Top 368 Renewable Quotes & Sayings - Page 7

Green is not just about renewable energy. It's also about creating a new direction for the whole economy. This requires government to step up, not step back, creating the kinds of mission-oriented public organizations that will enable us to tackle climate change - as ambitious as those that got us to the moon. It also requires the financial sector to be less short-term since we know that short-term finance has distorted incentives and directions in areas like biotechnology.

Above all, we should question the consumer ethic, which uses up non-renewable resources, creates inequality and injustice, generates pollution, destroys other species and upsets the balance of nature. The consumer ethic not only defiles the environment by creating undesirable change in the biosphere but also corrupts the mind and body by defining pleasure in terms of ownership and absorption. Waste itself is a human concept; everything in nature is eventually used. If human beings carry on in their present ways, they will one day be recycled along with the dinosaurs.

With living wage jobs, basically 20 million of them to help jump-start a sustainable and healthy economy, with an insured, just transition, for example, for workers in both the fossil fuel and in the weapons industry, because they all need to transition to sustainable forms of production. This is also our answer to the departure of manufacturing jobs and good jobs by creating the manufacturing base here for clean renewable energy and the efficiency systems and public transportation to put these workers to work in jobs that are actually good for them.

In nature the only source of energy is from the sun. So in ecological systems everything comes from the sun through the process of photosynthesis whereas now in human built environment our source of energy is from fossil fuels, renewable, wood energy or hydro-energy but it is not from the sun. So until we are able to operate and run a human built environment by imitating photosynthesis it will be a long while before we can have a true eco-system.

I have felt for a long time that the pathway to solving the climate crisis is through the building of a massive grassroots army of men and women who will go out there and win the conversation on climate, and persuade businesses, and universities, and towns to switch to renewable energy and to reduce emissions. And the big change from ten years ago is that people are way more receptive, not only to the message that we have to act, not only to the message that now we can act, we have the solutions now - that's the biggest change - but also willing to make a commitment that we will act.

I stood with Jeff Merkley, the senator from Oregon, and Bernie Sanders, who I think may come from the very state you are in today. And they put forward really a landmark piece of legislation. For the first time, they said we need 100 percent renewable energy. Not, "We need some solar panels and we need some fracking wells." Not the all of the above energy policy that the Obama administration favored. Instead, finally saying, we are ready to go, 100 percent. The technology is clearly there.

I would distinguish between Donald Trump and the United States of America. Although he is president, he does not speak for the country on the climate change, and that was vividly illustrated in the aftermath of his speech pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement. Almost immediately, not only did the rest of the world double down on its commitments, but also here in this country, governors, mayors, business leaders, they said, we're still in the Paris Agreement, and they're doubling down. A lot of cities have now made a decision to go 100% renewable energy.

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world.