Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

Today, we’re very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted – all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison – they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

I mean, people aren’t continuing like this and not doing anything because they are evil, or because they don’t want to. We aren’t destroying the biosphere because we are selfish. We are doing it simply because we are unaware.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it’s not going to be around forever.

In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

More businesses should be following Apple’s stance in encouraging more investment in sustainability.

In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.

We should remember that there are nations which meet more than 30 to 60% of their power requirements through the nuclear power system.

I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

We shouldn’t be saying ‚Save the planet‘; we should be saying: ‚Save viable conditions in which people can live.‘ That’s what we’re dealing with here.

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

I did this book ‚Harvest for Hope,‘ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you’ll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn’t sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in.

Gardening is not a rational act.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

There are thousands of ways to take action. For example, plant trees, pick up litter, join an organisation or movement that makes a difference and especially try to influence adults and put pressure on people in power.

An important priority for me is a business must get their own house in order. Be or become an agent of positive change in your own enterprise and adopt responsible practices to eliminate the risks that often lie at the root of inequality and poverty.

When the well is dry, they know the worth of water.

If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal? To me, that did not add up.

We will have to leave this planet, and we’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better.

This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don’t subsidize, we don’t want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it’s cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that’s the realm in which we should be playing.

Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner, but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.

Even if the economy crashes, we will still burn oil.

The effects of climate change are real and must be acted on.

The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

A diplomatic solution that puts significant and verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear program represents the best and most sustainable chance to ensure that America, Israel, the entire Middle East will never be menaced by a nuclear-armed Iran.

I talk to fashion designers and say I want some money to save the rainforest, and they say, ‚Oh, I agree with you completely Vivienne. Yes, climate change, it’s definitely happening,‘ but they don’t feel that they can do anything about it; they don’t even think ‚Well let’s stop it!‘

At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?

The main thing that’s missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.

We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases.

We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.

I’m not saying that people should stop flying. I’m just saying it needs to be easier to be climate neutral.

To me, a leader is someone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes. And so what I think is really important is sustainability.

I have a private plane. But I fly commercial when I go to environmental conferences.

I’ve been very passionate about renewable energy for many years, particularly solar energy and its capacity to bring abundant clean, sustainable energy to millions around the globe.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Nothing is being done to stop the climate and ecological emergency from happening and to secure the future wellbeing for future generations.

The future is green energy, sustainability, renewable energy.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

We must get rid of fossil fuels by developing injection systems for automobiles, which can run on bio-fuel.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.

We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.