"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones".
—John Cage"If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed."
—Chinese Proverb"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
—Albert Einstein"People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must."
—Thomas Friedman"The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable."
—John F. Kennedy"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." —Arnold Schopenhauer
"Avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable."
—Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable; United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development Report 2007
"Business is the force of change. Business is essential to solving the climate crisis, because this is what business is best at: innovating, changing, addressing risks, searching for opportunities. There is no more vital task."
—Richard Branson, CEO Virgin Group"You would think, wouldn’t you, that protecting the ultimate capital asset upon which all future income depends — in other words this fragile planet – was worth investing in, seriously and urgently. So isn’t now the critical time to be developing these technologies, business models and financial instruments for environmental reasons, above all, but also for economic reasons?"
—HRH Charles, The Prince of Wales"One of the risks if you have people with sustainability job titles is that everybody else just defers — it's a huge mistake. Where sustainability works best is where an organization's leadership gets it and wants it to happen and enables it to happen – so everyone from the person who sweeps the floor to the finance director feels part of that conversation."
—Will Day, Chairman, Sustainable Development Commission, UK, 2010"Doing the right thing on climate change saves money, retains customers, creates new market opportunity and takes you beyond just compliance. It reduces your risk exposure and reduces risk to shareholders."
—Dr Jonathan Foot, Chief Environmental Officer, EDF Energy (one of the largest UK energy suppliers), 2010"...it is business that can exercise the fastest degree of change by seeing the opportunity rather than the threat."
—Christopher Huhne, UK Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change"Businesses across the board need to make a serious assessment of their vulnerability to change and volatility on the energy scene. There are huge opportunities as energy systems evolve to include users and increase resilience and efficiency. There is also the potential for heavy or even catastrophic financial and environmental losses."
—Bernice Lee, Research Director Chatham House, UK"One lesson from the financial crisis should be that companies need to pay greater attention to 'tail risks' — events that may be of a low probability but that can have a major impact on the business."
—Lloyds’ 2010 report, "Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business""The empirical evidence suggests that a 10% increase in the price of oil is associated with about a 1.4% drop in U.S. real GDP."
—Keith Sill, Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2007"Business leaders need to rethink their approach to energy risks or be left behind as energy becomes less reliable and more expensive. We need a long-term plan to reduce consumption and diversify our energy sources."
—Richard Ward, CEO Lloyds
"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
—Will Durant"Every year the world fails to seriously deal with climate change raises the price tag by $500 billion —a lot of which, no doubt, Americans will be on the hook for."
—International Energy Agency, May 2010"Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."
—Rupert Murdoch 2007"Men argue; nature acts."
—Voltaire
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
—Edward Abbey
"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
—Albert Einstein"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
—Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)
"We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin."
—Leif Johansson, CEO Volvo Group"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
—Marcel Proust"You must stick to your conviction, but be ready to abandon your assumptions."
—Denis Waitley
"Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
—Albert Bartlett, Professor emeritus of Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder"Humans may build their societies around consumption of fossil resources long buried in the Earth, but these societies, being based on temporary resources, face the problem of being temporary themselves."
—C Bowden, Killing the Hidden Waters"We should not underestimate the scale of the energy, climate, and resources challenge… While we’ve grown accustomed to thinking that the era of easy oil is drawing to a close, it would more accurate to say: the end of easy energy."
—Jorma Ollila, Shell Chairman"To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed."
—Theodore Roosevelt
"Over human history, every boost in sustainable population levels has been achieved by a new energy technology."
—Aaron Dunlap"Now the shale play for natural gas is very large, but my geological research indicates that these fields are not perhaps as good as some people suggest. They won’t solve all of our energy problems; they’re not that good, that big or that long lasting… As I calculated, we are in a lot of trouble in energy in the United States and around the world by about 2012-2015."
—Charles T. Maxwell, senior energy analyst, Weeden & Co."How much longer can the world pretend that it won’t soon be facing another energy shock, one every bit as challenging as the one it faced two years ago? Whether we are talking about supply or demand, there is nothing on the horizon to prevent the imminent return of the very same oil prices that put us into the deepest postwar recession yet in the first place."
—Jeff Rubin, Energy expert & former chief economist,CIBC World Markets, 2009"While we can’t do anything about triple-digit oil prices, there’s a whole lot we can do to make sure that when we encounter [them], they don’t have to be so devastating as in the past."
—Jeff Rubin, Energy expert & former chief economist, CIBC World Markets"You know, the world’s not running out of oil. There’s all kinds of oil left in all kinds of places. …We’re never going to run out of oil. But what the world is going to run out of, indeed, what the world has already run out of, is the oil you can afford to burn."
—Jeff Rubin, Energy expert & former chief economist, CIBC World Markets"The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."
—2005 US Department of Energy commissioned report, "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management""By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.”
—US Joint Forces Command’s Joint Operating Environment (JOE) 2010 report"The recent Deepwater oil spill shows all too clearly the hazards of moving into ever more unpredictable terrain to extract energy resources. And the rapid deployment of cleaner energy technologies will radically alter the risk landscape."
—Dr. Richard Ward, CEO Lloyd's"...all businesses, not just the energy sector, need to consider how they, their suppliers and their customers will be affected by energy supplies which are less reliable and more expensive."
—Dr. Richard Ward, CEO Lloyd's"Independently of what happens in UN negotiating rooms, businesses can take action. We can plan our energy needs, we can make every effort to reduce consumption, and we can aim for a mix of different energy sources. The transformation of the energy environment from carbon to clean energy sources creates an extraordinary risk management challenge for businesses. Traditional models that focus on annual profits, and at best, medium term strategies may struggle. ... Energy security requires a long-term view, and it is the companies who grasp this who will trade on into the second half of this century."
—Dr. Richard Ward, CEO Lloyd's"The work of the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security shouldn’t be disparagingly dismissed. Its arguments are well founded and lead it to the conclusion that, while the global downturn may have delayed it by a couple of years, peak oil—the point at which global production reaches its maximum—is no more than five years away. Governments and corporations need to use the intervening years to speed up the development of and move toward other energy sources and increased energy efficiency."
—Patience Wheatcroft, the Wall Street Journal, Feb 2010
"When we build, let us build as if it would last forever."
—John Ruskin, 19th century English author, poet and artist
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
—Albert Einstein"Piecemeal approaches that are assumed to be the answer are as dangerous as no response at all."
—Geary Rummler & Alan Brache
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong."
—Richard P. Feynman
"The wise man doesn’t give the right answers - he poses the right questions."
—Claude Levi Strauss