Fossils Quotes - Page 17

• In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

  John Reader

  Science, Elephants, Apples

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• This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

  Wendell Berry

  Ignorance, Character, Oil

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.20, Counterpoint

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• The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world.

  Denis Hayes

  Sunshine, Years, Energy

  Denis Hayes (2000). “The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair”, p.37, Island Press

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• All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Taken, Animal, Men

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• Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Business, Ocean, Race

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It's just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous.

  David J. C. MacKay

  Wind, Feet, Nuclear

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• Just 8% of the $409bn spent on fossil-fuel subsidies in 2010 went to the poorest 20% of the population.

  Fatih Birol

  Population, Fuel, Subsidies

  "Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies 'could provide half of global carbon target'" by Duncan Clark, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2012.

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• Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources.

  Jose Angel Gurria

  Government, Giving, Energy

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• Buttons are the fossils of the sartorial world, enduring long past the garments they were designed to hold together.

  Martha Stewart

  Past, Clothes, Long

  Martha Stewart (2005). “The World According to Martha”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.

  Charlie Munger

  Stupid, Energy, Fuel

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• ...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.

  Michael Pollan

  Cooking, Energy, East

  Michael Pollan (2006). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, p.180, Penguin

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• Evolution is a large political controversy as to what should be taught in the schools. But there is no scientific controversy that we evolved when we talk about evidence from fossils and DNA.

  Carl Zimmer

  School, Dna, Political

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• Trees and soils can absorb carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning. It would be great to subsidize responsible farmers and forest managers.

  Alana Beard

  Tree, Soil, Forests

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• On the contrary, there is a considerable body of evidence that these fossil traces, known as 'dino-fuzz', have nothing to do with bird feathers... I, and many others, do not find any credible evidence that those structures represent protofeathers.

  Alan Feduccia

  Bird, Body, Structure

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• If you get a drill and drill down 5km beneath the ground, it's teeming with life - millions of tiny living fossils. They resemble the earliest life forms and suggest that life started under the Ground. The bible talks of Eden as a sunny parkland with white fluffy clouds, but it probably ascended from the region that we now associate with Hell.

  Paul Davies

  Spring, Clouds, White

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• What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

  Michael Shermer

  Spring, Space, Hands

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• If [a student's] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

  Bill McKibben

  College, Degrees, Guarantees

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• The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

  Janine Benyus

  Burning Fossil Fuels, Want, Truth Is

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• There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.

  Bill McKibben

  Wind, Oil, Coal

  "It’s Time for Interfaith Moral Action on Climate Change" by Bill McKibben, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 9, 2012.

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• These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us - it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to this problem. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet. We've never figured out, though God knows we've tried, a more effective way to destroy their lives.

  Bill McKibben

  Country, People, Fuel

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• When they were putting oil rigs up and down the California coast, the whole issue of safe energy and the addiction to fossil fuels really came into focus.

  Bonnie Raitt

  California Coast, Oil, Issues

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• Energy markets can be thought of as suffering from appendicitis due to fossil fuel subsidies. They need to be removed for a healthy energy economy.

  Fatih Birol

  Business, Healthy, Suffering

  "Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies 'could provide half of global carbon target'" by Duncan Clark, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2012.

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• There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Different, Himalayas, Different Things

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.67, Canongate Books

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• I went with Beach Fossils and we played 40 shows because we wanted people to see us.

  Zachary Cole Smith

  Beach, People, Shows

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.

  Bill McKibben

  Real, Issues, Climate

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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