A Quote by Vaclav Smil

Behind every morsel of bread, fruits, or meat is a large amount of transformed fossil fuels. — © Vaclav Smil
Behind every morsel of bread, fruits, or meat is a large amount of transformed fossil fuels.
We're going to get off fossil fuels, no question. We may not do it quickly enough to avoid some pain, and I'm quite worried about that. But by the 22nd century, there's no way we'll be on fossil fuels.
All scientists who've looked at it know we have to phase away from burning fossil fuels. That means we've got to put a lot of effort into alternate energy technologies, but we're still subsidizing fossil fuels and not subsidizing most of the alternatives. It's not going to be an easy transition.
The U.K. government faces three choices to deal with carbon-heavy fossil fuels: force people to stop using them immediately; facilitate a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; or hope business-as-usual market forces solve our problem for us.
For me, food is all about balance. If you eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, and an appropriate amount of poultry, fish, and red meat that are sourced from good places, you're doing well. It's important to make sure that the meat you're consuming is hormone-free.
Rome wasn't built in a day, and we won't replace fossil fuels with clean energy based on the events of a single week, either. But the important thing to remember is that, once they happen, clean energy victories are irreversible. No one will tear down wind farms because they are nostalgic for fracking in our watersheds. And nobody will pull down their solar panels because they miss having mercury in their tuna or asthma inhalers for their kids. Because once we leave fossil fuels behind, we are never going back.
The true cost of the pollution that is being dumped into the atmosphere and manifests itself in our sick children dealing with asthma or older folks dealing with heart and lung disease from the pollutions created by the burning of these fossil fuels, may not be reflected in the prices of fossil fuels, but that does not mean we aren't paying a high price for them.
Solar and wind are now cheaper in many places than some fossil fuels and within the next two years, three, four, five years at the most. What the exponential curve does isn't going to go away. It is totally over for fossil fuels and nuclear. Nuclear's actually gone out.
Most progressive in the Democratic Party doesn't cut it, you know. If we still can't have a health care system that provides health care as a human right, if we still cannot, you know, ban fracking and fossil fuels and move like our lives depend on it - you know, we say in the next 15 years we need to phase out fossil fuels.
Developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class-involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing-are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.
One problem is that we are heavily dependent upon fossil fuels. And that's where the greenhouse gases come from, by and large, some deforestation, as well. But we have not yet come to grips with how to change that. So that's where we are right now.
We could replace people with fossil fuels, have higher and higher levels of industrialization, of agriculture, of production, without thinking of the green-house gases we were admitting, and climate change is really the pollution of the engineering paradigm, when fossil fuels drove industrialism. To now offer that same mindset as a solution is to not take seriously what Einstein said: that you can't solve the problems by using the same mindset that caused them.
Today, wind is the cheapest energy in America; solar is not far behind. In time, fossil fuels will only get more and more expensive.
Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.
Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
We have already used more than half of that budget. This means that three quarters of the fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, and the fossil fuels we do use must be utilized sparingly and responsibly.
Fossil fuels will run out not because of limited resources but because of the environmental impact. If I can solve that impact, I have basically increased the resource base by a vast amount.
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