Top 100 Carbon's Quotes
#1. Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.'
Sam Kean
#2. If we don't cut carbon's money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#3. It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way. It's all just pattern.
Peter Watts
#4. Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds.
Sam Kean
#5. In terms of environmental impact, Samasource jobs are very green. Our product is human intelligence, and it's transported through the Internet rather than via carbon-intensive trucking, shipping, and warehousing.
Leila Janah
#6. Clearly, the left-wing groups want to use this carbon theme as a tool for wealth redistribution.
Lubos Motl
#7. The cap-and-trade plan is more market driven than anything else. If you want to discourage carbon use, you have to make it more expensive, but what is crucial is that this be a worldwide program that includes China and India.
Phil Gramm
#8. I wanted my eternity in carbon molecules, in being part of the trees, the sky, air itself
Ruth Ahmed
#9. If climate change issues are not adequately addressed - if we keep running those nice energy subsidies, if the price on carbon is not adequately set, if policymakers don't have it on their radar screens - then financial stability in the medium and long-term is clearly at stake.
Christine Lagarde
#10. One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.
Sam Kean
#11. If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands.
Winona LaDuke
#12. Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
Al Gore
#13. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide.
John Boehner
#14. A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.
Michael Pollan
#15. Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life.
Elias James Corey
#16. Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
Peter Heller
#17. We have always existed in different forms - carbon, oxygen, water, heat. Maybe Heaven is this brief period when the elements realize they're alive.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#18. The fact that we have been able to perturb the carbon cycle with our industrial revolution is evidence of how vulnerable we are - because when we destroy our environments, we destroy our food and energy supplies. In short, we destroy ourselves.
Annalee Newitz
#19. If you have a carbon cap and trade system, there'd be an agreed-to limit the amount of carbon we emit. That changes the economic picture for fossil technologies and for the renewable technologies. It makes the renewable technologies more attractive and the fossils less attractive.
Vinod Khosla
#20. What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.
Bill Bryson
#21. I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.
Susan George
#22. Cuts in carbon emissions would mean significantly higher electricity prices. We think the American consumer would prefer not to be skinned by Obama's EPA.
Fred Upton
#24. The coal plants that will be built from 2005 to 2030 will release as much carbon dioxide as all of the coal burned since the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago.
Joseph J. Romm
#25. The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round.
Andrey Kapitsa
#26. Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
#27. 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
#28. In the head-spinning cosmos of climate change, everyday hundreds of people claim there are 'thousands of papers' in support of a theory, yet no one can actually name one single paper with empirical evidence that shows carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of global warming.
Joanne Nova
#29. Carbon-carbon bond formation reactions are important processes in chemistry because they provide key steps in building complex, bio-active molecules developed as medicines and agrochemicals.
Akira Suzuki
#30. New York and Connecticut belong to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to cut carbon emissions, and New York City has been a leader in energy efficiency.
Frances Beinecke
#31. Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.
Douglas Adams
#32. Chinese emissions are a problem not just for its own people but also for the world. It has now overtaken the U.S. as the biggest carbon emitter; most of the coal that is burned anywhere on Earth is burned in China.
James Fallows
#33. The rewards that will flow from a successful shift to a low carbon economy are high. Neither governments nor business can afford to let these opportunities pass them by
Margaret Beckett
#34. Dead isn't angels or ghosts. It's a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body
so that they can return to their most elemental stage.
Jodi Picoult
#35. Build high-speed, electrified trains over the most-traveled corridors. It'sreally hard to power carbon-free airplanes, but electrified trains are much easier. We'll be a half century behind the Japanese, but better late than never.
Denis Hayes
#36. Too often we assume that what is "best" means that our children should live their lives according to the script that has worked for us. Without realizing it, we try to create carbon copies of ourselves.
Charles F. Boyd
#37. It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.
Annalee Newitz
#38. It will be nearly impossible to slow warming appreciably without condemning much of the world to poverty unless energy sources that emit little or no carbon dioxide become competitive with conventional fossil fuels.
Henry Sylvester Jacoby
#39. Consider carbon, for example. The lifetime of carbon in the combined atmosphere-ocean-biosphere, the time it takes on average before the typical carbon atom is transferred to the sediment, is less than 200,000 years.
Michael B McElroy
#40. By kicking its carbon addiction, America will increase its national wealth and generate millions of jobs that can't be outsourced.
Van Jones
#41. Nest Thermostat owners like the carbon monoxide link. If Nest Protect's carbon monoxide alarm goes off, the Nest Thermostat automatically turns off the gas furnace.
Tony Fadell
#42. Between 45 and 75 per cent of worldwide carbon emissions are controlled by or attributed to urban areas.7,
Stephen R.J. Sheppard
#43. Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic,
Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.
Kathleen Raine
#44. Carbon dioxide is ... being portrayed as a pollutant; in fact, it makes things grow, and it is not toxic to humans.
Dana Rohrabacher
#45. The water issue is critically related to climate change. People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth.
Jim Yong Kim
#46. Even if we can solve the carbon problem for coal, it is still a non-renewable resource. At some point, coal supplies will drop.
Van Jones
#47. With the front casing removed, he fired up the boiler and showed him the colour of the gas flame. 'It should normally burn blue, but due to corrosion, the flame is blue to orange, which is a tell-tale sign of leaking carbon monoxide.
B.P. Smythe
#48. Most commercial products that contain organic molecules possess at least one carbon-carbon double bond, or if one is not present, it is likely that an olefin was used in its preparation. This being the case, the potential applications of olefin metathesis are endless.
Robert H. Grubbs
#49. Every golf course should have its carbon rating on the scorecard, alongside its Course Rating, Slope, par and yardage.
Thomas Friedman
#50. It is important that carbon storage is carefully regulated, that the process is transparent to the public, and that there is a clear accounting of what happened to the CO2. This is particularly true of underground storage, where there is always a small chance that pressurized CO2 could escape.
Klaus Lackner
#51. If there's one thing I would like to see, it'd be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions.
Barack Obama
#52. Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Azar Nafisi
#53. Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.
Jamais Cascio
#55. The palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction between different types of organoboron compounds and various organic electrophiles including halides or triflates in the presence of a base provides a powerful and general methodology for the formation of carbon-carbon bonds.
Akira Suzuki
#56. We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.
William McDonough
#57. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Robert M. Pirsig
#58. I'm passionate about restoring the efficacy of American democracy, making capitalism sustainable, prioritizing advances in technology, and seizing the opportunities to use that kind of innovation to help usher in a new economy that doesn't rely on carbon-spewing fossil fuels.
Al Gore
#59. Solving climate change is a complex topic, but in a single crude brush-stroke, here is the solution: the price of carbon dioxide must be such that people stop burning coal without capture.
David J. C. MacKay
#60. The US and Australia have a lot in common. One of the things we have in common is we produce a lot of carbon.
Barack Obama
#61. There is no set period of time or total amount of carbon emissions that we can stay below to ensure we stay safe.
Katharine Hayhoe
#62. Carbon is probably a bit harder to wrap since it's procedural.
Bill Hayden
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere ... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.
Elon Musk
#66. Just about every generation has some horrific evil that it must fight. For the Democratic Party today that evil is carbon dioxide emissions. For the rest of us, it is an ideology that teaches that its deity is sanctified by the blood of innocents.
Dennis Prager
#67. Many scientists and economists also say putting a price on carbon through carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade is necessary.
David Suzuki
#68. Climate is not responding to greenhouse gases in the way we thought it might. If increasing carbon dioxide is in fact increasing climate change, its impact is smaller than natural variation. People are being misled by people making money out of this.
Chris De Freitas
#69. Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax.
Stewart Brand
#70. We conservatives fight evil; the Left fights carbon emissions
Dennis Prager
#71. Using less of the Earth's resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.
Jeremy Rifkin
#72. Australia has suffered a decade of drought, epic floods, a Category 5 cyclone, and a plague of locusts. But just because Aussies have the biggest carbon footprint in the world, it doesn't mean they're stupid.
Jeff Goodell
#73. It's a really big deal to do a spacewalk. It's much riskier than staying indoors. It's complex. It uses up a lot of the precious resources onboard. It uses up oxygen. It uses up carbon dioxide scrubbers.
Chris Hadfield
#74. Despite what you might guess, when monitoring your breathing, your body doesn't care whether you're inhaling enough oxygen. It cares only whether you're expelling enough carbon dioxide - that's the gas that sets off the panic button when you're suffocating.
Sam Kean
#75. Smart cities are those who manage their resources efficiently. Traffic, public services and disaster response should be operated intelligently in order to minimize costs, reduce carbon emissions and increase performance.
Eduardo Paes
#76. So the coffee came and I tasted it - a hot, foul, acidic, dual-carbon compound liquid - and I spat it out all over her. A major breach of human etiquette: apparently, I was meant to swallow
Matt Haig
#77. On the environmental front there's concern about global warming and high levels of carbon dioxide, and trees take in CO2 and store carbon.
Clive Anderson
#78. We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we're releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated].
Thom Hartmann
#79. A cap on carbon is important because it sets a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050.
Frances Beinecke
#80. We need the world to put a price on carbon.
Tony Hayward
#81. Detailed scientific arguments by the authors present a serious challenge to the expositors of the Copernican Principle (that man is merely an impure lump of carbon crawling about on the surface of an insignificant speck of cosmic dust).
David Medved
#82. If carbon came out of the ground, it has to go back into the ground.
Klaus Lackner
#83. With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?
Tim Ferriss
#84. It's not the case that carbon dioxide drives temperatures. When you leave Ice Ages, it's the other way around: The temperatures go up first, and then carbon dioxide levels go up.
Piers Corbyn
#86. Just as human activity is upsetting Earth's carbon cycle, our actions are altering the water cycle.
David Suzuki
#87. We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.
David Attenborough
#88. The best way to deal with climate change has been obvious for years: cut greenhouse-gas emissions severely. We haven't done that. In 2010, for example, carbon emissions rose by six per cent - the largest such increase on record.
Michael Specter
#89. Mangroves, salt marshes and sea grass lock away carbon at up to five times the rate of tropical forests.
Frances Beinecke
#90. Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.
Sylvia Earle
#91. The existence of the EPA regulation will require large carbon polluters to look at their hole cards, and some of them have decided that they much prefer legislation.
Al Gore
#92. Guilt: it comes in so many subtle forms. It's carbon monoxide for the soul.
Sandra Vischer
#93. Scratch the surface at conservative think tanks and universities that house free-market economists, and it's not hard to find proponents of a carbon tax.
Nina Easton
#94. Running is the right thing to do! I am free, healthy with a good complexion. It is that automobile addict who should be ashamed: driving in a sealed car in warmed-over carbon monoxide and smoking a seegar. I am the Goddess! He is a bug in a monkey nut!
Brenda Ueland
#95. The fact is fossil fuel carbon will stay in the surface climate system for millennia.
James Hansen
#96. Healthy forests and wetlands stand sentry against the dangers of climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it away in plants, root systems and soil.
Frances Beinecke
#97. Communal forests around the world are being turned into privatized tree farms and preserves so their owners can collect something called "carbon credits," a lucrative scam I'll explore later.
Naomi Klein
#98. The sooner the US puts a cap on our dangerous carbon pollution, the sooner we can create a new generation of clean energy jobs here in America ...
Carol Browner
#99. If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.
Andrew H. Knoll
#100. I think it's harder for people than it should be. But as more and more of us become carbon neutral and change the patterns in our lives to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, we are now beginning to see the changes in policy that are needed.
Al Gore
