Richard Heinberg Quotes

• Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.

  Richard Heinberg

  Struggle, Oil, Ecosystems

  49 Copy quote

• If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.

  Richard Heinberg

  Ecosystems, People, Support

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• When we decline to talk about what is real simply because it's uncomfortable to do so, we seal our own fate.

  Richard Heinberg

  Real, Fate, Decline

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• Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.

  Richard Heinberg

  Oil, Impact, Environmental

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• The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.

  Richard Heinberg

  Competition, Environmental, Energy

  Richard Heinberg (2003). “The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies”, New Society Pub

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• We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice - not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives - will have profound ethical and political ramifications.

  Richard Heinberg

  Years, Profound, Choices

  Richard Heinberg (2005). “The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies”, p.6, CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

  7 Copy quote

• The idea that we industrialized humans are immune to the natural laws that have restrained growth in other species-and humans in past social regimes-is to me so self-servingly blind as to be morally reprehensible.

  Richard Heinberg

  Past, Ideas, Oil

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• All of the easy oil is gone and what's left is requiring more energy and money and this has an effect on everything. Our problem is that we've created an infrastructure that's so dependent on oil. As oil becomes more expensive we're going to be locked into the transportation modes that our economy depends on. So we really need to start building an alternative economy before we get caught in a trap of our own making.

  Richard Heinberg

  Energy, Problem, Building

  7 Copy quote

• As political theorist Michael Parenti points out, historians often overlook Fascism's economic agenda--the partnership between Big Capital and Big Government--in their analysis of its authoritarian social program. Indeed, according to Bertram Gross in his startlingly prescient Friendly Fascism (1980), it is possible to achieve fascist goals within an ostensibly democratic society.

  Richard Heinberg

  Government, Goal, Political

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• The real problem is that we use too much oil. It's that simple and that difficult. If we truly want to reduce our vulnerability to high prices, the best way to do so is to reduce consumption.

  Richard Heinberg

  Real, Simple, Oil

  7 Copy quote

• If we aim for what is no longer possible, we will achieve only delusion and frustration. But if we aim for genuinely worthwhile goals that can be attained, then even if we have less energy at our command and fewer material goods available, we might nevertheless still increase our satisfaction in life.

  Richard Heinberg

  Frustration, Satisfaction In Life, Goal

  Richard Heinberg (2011). “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality”, p.259, CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

  7 Copy quote

• The science is in: either we go cold turkey on our coal, oil, and gas addictions, or we risk raising the planet's temperature to a level incompatible with the continued existence of civilization.

  Richard Heinberg

  Turkeys, Civilization, Oil

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• Today, it is especially difficult for most people to understand our perilous global energy situation precisely because it has never been more important to do so.

  Richard Heinberg

  People, Important, Energy

  Richard Heinberg (2015). “Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels”, p.8, New Society Publishers

  6 Copy quote

• What's new is high oil prices and the economy hates high oil prices.

  Richard Heinberg

  Hate, Oil, Economy

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• Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world.

  Richard Heinberg

  Thinking, People, Environmental

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• It is possible to point to hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of imaginative, courageous programs to reduce, recycle, and reuse - yet the overall trajectory of industrial civilization remains relatively unchanged.

  Richard Heinberg

  Civilization, Reuse, Courageous

  Richard Heinberg (2015). “Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels”, p.65, New Society Publishers

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• When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.

  Richard Heinberg

  Environmental, Energy, Levels

  12 Copy quote

• Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

  Richard Heinberg

  Growth, Done, Economic

  Richard Heinberg (2011). “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality”, p.1, CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

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• ...the era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak in 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America's petroleum-dependent food system

  Richard Heinberg

  Oil, America, Events

  Richard Heinberg (2010). “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines”, p.48, New Society Publishers

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