A Quote by William McDonough

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

William McDonough

Quote Topics

Atmosphere Bad Body Burn Carbon Good Good Thing Nature Release System Thing Tree Wants Wrong Your Your Body

Quote Author

William McDonough
American - Designer
Born: February 21, 1951

We have carbon in the atmosphere. That is a material in the wrong place problem. It's just like what I said about the lead. Lead in the biosphere is not good. Carbon in the atmosphere (over natural levels) is a problem.

William McDonough

When you buy carbon offsets, you pay to take planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in exchange for the greenhouse gases you put in. For example, you can put money toward replanting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Tatiana Schlossberg

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

Richard Smalley

We have to be bringing carbon out of the atmosphere, and we can't wait for these magical technologies that are somehow going to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere in the future and mean we can do business as usual. And so, what we have to do, what we're going to need to do, is really work with nature to repair the climate.

Gail Bradbrook

Ocean acidification is caused by the ocean absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the same carbon dioxide that is the primary cause of global warming, hence the nickname 'the other carbon problem.' As they do so, the oceans become more acidic with terrible consequences.

Philippe Cousteau, Jr.

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.

William McDonough

Investment in jobs at a time when millions are unemployed can only be a good thing: all the better if the jobs help us shift from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy.

Sharan Burrow

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

Freeman Dyson

Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.

Bill McKibben

Essentially, by 2050 we need all activities outside agriculture to be near zero carbon emitting if we are to stop carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere growing

David Miliband

Human releases of carbon dioxide are almost certainly happening faster than any natural carbon release since the beginning of life on Earth.

Mark Lynas

One of the reasons why I say we all need to work together to save the Congo forest, because if we don't save the Congo forest, the Amazon forest and the southeast Asia forest, if those forests release the carbon they are trapping at the moment, much of what you will be doing in the North will be negated by the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.

Wangari Maathai

As we burn fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide, much of which is absorbed by the oceans.

Tatiana Schlossberg

A lot of the bikes are carbon wheels now, and you don't have as good a braking surface on a carbon wheel in the wet weather as you do on the old aluminium rims.

Bradley Wiggins

The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.