Heinberg Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Teddy: Sorry, Kaplan. You're stuck with me. Till death do us part.
Billy: Teddy Altman, did you just propose to me?

Allan Heinberg

#3. We achieve true wholeness only by embracing our fragility and sometimes, our brokenness. Wholeness is a natural radiance of Love, and Love demands that we allow the destruction of our old self for the sake of the new.

Jalaja Bonheim

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

Richard Heinberg

#5. In many countries today, moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered; national traditions, differences in nation and culture are being erased.

Vladimir Putin

#6. 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

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

Richard Heinberg

#8. 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

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

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. 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

#12. You must not judge of Celia's feeling from mine. I think she likes these small pets. She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond of. It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it. I am rather short-sighted.

George Eliot

#13. Dear Teddy, you are without a doubt the best boyfriend in the world. You're kind. You're generous. You threaten to maim people for me. -- Billy

Allan Heinberg

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Stop trying to be a magician. The past won't come back. It likes its safety in memory.

Adib Khan

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

Richard Heinberg

#18. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. It is a fact that the ecological devastation of the planet can be traced to the consumption of meat and dairy, which contributes to water, soil, and air pollution as well as global warming and the mass extinction of many species of plant and animal forms.

Sharon Gannon

#22. 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

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

Richard Heinberg

#24. Innocence based in ignorance was unfit to protect itself.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#25. But maybe, that's the point. That there are no guarentees. There are no happy endings. But you show up anyway. You don't give up. You NEVER give up. Maybe that's what it takes to be a HERO. -Billy Kaplan

Allan Heinberg