Richard Heinberg Quotes

#1. Capitalism , as Marx defined it, is a system in which productive wealth is privately owned. Communism (which Marx proposed as an alternative) is one in which productive wealth is owned by the community, or by the nation on behalf of the people.

Richard Heinberg

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

Richard Heinberg

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Nationalization of the economy will not constitute a solution to society's difficulties; it will merely be a reflexive means of averting immediate meltdown.

Richard Heinberg

#6. The end of economic growth does not necessarily mean we've reached the end of qualitative improvements in human life.

Richard Heinberg

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Richard Heinberg

#12. 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

#13. the existing market economy has no "stable" or "neutral" setting: there is only growth or contraction.

Richard Heinberg

#14. 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

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

Richard Heinberg