Jan > Jan's Quotes

“Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I’ve been a passionate adventurer in the solar industry and the sustainability movement my whole life. I try hard to walk my talk. My wife, Nantzy, and I live in an off-the-grid home (see page 70) built of recycled and green materials, powered by solar (passive and active) and hydroelectric energy, with gorgeous biodynamic gardens and fruit orchards that provide most of our food, a 15-acre biodynamic olive orchard, an 8-acre biodynamic vineyard, and a dozen beehives. I’m fortunate to benefit from the fruits of all our collective labors. As the solar industry continues to grow and mature, and as our cultural consciousness evolves, I remain hopeful that, once and for all, we will get things right in”
― John Schaeffer, Real Goods Solar Living Sourcebook

“our homes, communities, country, and on our planet. Instead of forever being blamed for the excesses that put our planet on the destructive path, perhaps we can be viewed as the generation that rose above comfort and decadence to turn things around.”
― John Schaeffer, Real Goods Solar Living Sourcebook

“Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can. But this opinion of mine, like that of every other economist who has pronounced upon the subject, is in itself completely uninteresting. What counts in any attempt at social prognosis is not the Yes or No that sums up the facts and arguments which lead up to it but those facts and arguments themselves.”
― Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

“A “tax or emission trading scheme on livestock,” they argued, “could be an economically sound policy that would modify consumer prices and affect consumption patterns.” In the end, as climate impacts increase, the web of costs associated with cultivating plants and animals for food grows ever more complex—”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“In other words, turning a tree into a desk just slows down the release of carbon dioxide, it doesn’t prevent it.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“(This of course would be laughable were it not for the fact that the country’s largest timber company, Sierra Pacific Industries, successfully demanded that the CO2 sequestered in its “wood products” be counted by the state of California as saved carbon when tallying up the company’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“The “they” in this case was “us”—meaning those who do not live in the Amazon, namely Americans and Europeans who have come to recognize the central role played by forests in the earth’s ecology. If the forest is so important for us—for the planet—then its time to pay for it. Braga suggested I visit an offset project he’d helped establish south of the city.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“At the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the United States, Britain, Norway, and other developed countries committed $4.5 billion to launch a global initiative that would begin to assess the value of the world’s tropical rain forests. Four years later, in 2013, at the Warsaw Climate Change Conference, further rules set criteria for tropical countries to meet in order to receive payments in return for reducing deforestation or launching sustainable forest management strategies. Now global efforts focus on what the forests are worth, and who will pay to keep them standing.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“It also makes clear why an observational study needs to collect lots of ancillary information about each participant so that the kind of balancing required can be attempted. In a true experiment, with random assignment, such information is (in theory) not required. Here enters Paul Holland, whose observations about the inevitability of missing data will further illuminate our journey.”
― Howard Wainer, Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist

“In the past a theory could get by on its beauty; in the modern world a successful theory has to work for a living.”
― Howard Wainer, Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist

“By 2008, new U.S. autos averaged a miserable 23 mpg on the road. No wonder America’s best-selling vehicle in 2008, the Ford F150 pickup truck, got fewer miles per gallon than the groundbreaking Model T had a century earlier.”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“The 2008–2009 Great Recession also sent U.S. auto sales plunging from nearly 17 million in 2005 to 10.4 million in 2009, helping push the U.S. industry to the brink of collapse.”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“Some automakers already sell autos with carbon-fiber composite parts or powered by electric motors. As we’ll see next, these innovations are about to converge, not just to make a better, more efficient auto but to support the companies’ long-term survival and success. So how can we make this revolutionary leap?”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“With composites, it may be possible to use “paint-in-mold” techniques to prime or color a part while forming it, greatly simplifying the paint shop or eliminating it altogether.”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“About half today’s production cost is for precursor material—96% of which is polyacrylonitrile made from oil (propylene) or natural gas (propane), both of which have volatile prices. Carbon-fiber manufacturers are starting to make their own precursors and expect to cut their costs by about 20%. But much cheaper precursors are emerging. Their strands of carbon atoms are commonplace; the trick is removing the other elements and forming the remaining carbon skeleton into long, pure strands. Solve those problems, and carbon fiber could be made from biomaterials like plant fibers, or even from recycled plastic trash. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) believes these alternatives could potentially cut carbon-fiber costs by up to 90%,”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“about the safety of composites-based vehicles? Until recently, the prevailing view in the U.S. auto industry was that efficient autos are small, unsafe, sluggish, costly, or otherwise so undesirable that customers would buy them only if the government required or subsidized them. However, the physics of autos shows that light weight and efficiency can actually mean spacious, safer (see Crash Safety with Composites sidebar), peppier, and cost-competitive. People will buy such autos because they’re better, not just because they’re more efficient,”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“Aluminum absorbs about twice as much crash energy per pound as steel, while carbon-fiber composites are up to six times better than aluminum.”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“Contrary to some recent reports, electrification won’t be constrained by critical materials (see The Rare-Earth Conundrum sidebar); rather, they’re vibrant business opportunities to displace scarce elements and to use them more productively, durably, and recoverably.”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“Feebates make efficient autos cheaper to buy and inefficient autos costlier.79 Buy a fuel hog and you’d pay an up-front fee, right on the price sticker, that climbs as its fuel economy declines. But choose a fuel sipper instead and you’d get a rebate funded by others’ fees: the more efficient the auto, the bigger the rebate.”
― Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

“precious supply of beer.”
― Jennifer Jensen Wallach, How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture

“Our current food system is simply unsustainable: when as many as 20 calories of energy or resources goes into every 1 calorie of food nutrition that we end up eating;”
― John D. Ivanko, Farmstead Chef

“recent decades, American utility companies have spent relatively little on research and development. One industry report estimates that, in 2009, research-and-development investments made by all US electrical-power utilities amounted to at most $700 million, compared with $6.3 billion by IBM and $9.1 billion by Pfizer. In 2009, however, the Department of Energy issued $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to a hundred smart-grid projects across the United States, including many in areas that are prone to heat waves and hurricanes.”
― Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

“We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s,” Klaus Jacob observed. “But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats.”
― Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

“I’m not even much of a gardener—my contribution to the family garden consists mainly of compost.”
― Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf

“These same forces now keep the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from taking bold action to regulate carbon dioxide pollution as our planet heats to dangerous levels. Most worrisome, these dynamics persist at all levels of government. And they do not disappear with changes in political administrations – although some administrations produce far worse policy than others.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Scientists warn that only a narrow window of opportunity remains in which to address climate emergency and other environmental calamities before irrevocable tipping points forever change our planet.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

“Often it does not matter much what the law says; the politics will circumvent it. Every devastated watershed, every new mile of sprawl, every new clear cut, every new oil pipeline, and every blasted mountaintop reflects excessive indulgence condoned by the politics of scarcity.”
― Mary Christina Wood, Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age