Unstoppable Quotes

“We can be a lot smarter and more capable than a lot of the technology doubters and climate deniers assume. The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence—we, as a species, working together—to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we’re working on that will change the world for the better. Which way of looking at the world is going to produce a Next Greatest Generation? Will it be the ones who give up, or the ones who get going?”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“so long as we each focus only on our individual decisions and their short-term consequences, we will act like renters, not owners of this Earth.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“More than five hundred people have flown in space and twelve people have walked on the moon, but only three humans in history have been to the bottom of the ocean.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“Because methane is so powerful as a greenhouse gas, let’s phase it out as fast as we practically can, while we absolutely stop burning coal. It’s everything-all-at-once time. Coal, gas, oil … ultimately, they all have to go. The real key for the Next Great Generation will be to build a society that doesn’t need natural gas or fossil fuels of any kind at all.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“People like my parents, both veterans of World War II, came to be called the “Greatest Generation,” because they rose to the challenge and defended the world against tyranny. Often enough, certain pundits imply that no generation since—today’s generation, especially—can live up to the standard of the greatest generation. I could not disagree more. We face a challenge right now, you and I, that is even greater in aspect and scope than a global war. It is a battle for our house and home, and for our future on this planet. It is a moment for all of us to step up: through our personal effort, through the innovations we create, through the policies we support, through the people we vote for. You and I can be a part of the Next Great Generation. We can save Earth—for us. Let’s get to work.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“A quantum is the smallest amount of energy there is. So when you hear someone say such and such a thing was or is a “quantum leap,” he or she is actually talking about the smallest possible leap of any kind found in nature. It’s an ironic use of the phrase. However, I’ll grant you that the quantum leap represents an enormous step in thought. In a quantum leap, a particle is either here, or it’s there—in an instant. This discovery changed the world.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“We can become a great generation that leaves our world—our home—in better shape than it is now while raising the quality of life for people everywhere. This will not be easy. We’ve already loaded the atmosphere with enough heat-trapping gases of various kinds to cause our planet to keep warming for many, many years to come. But the situation is far from hopeless.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“The United States Department of Defense makes its position clear in a policy statement published in 2014. The document begins: Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe. In our defense strategy, we refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today—from infectious disease to terrorism. We are already beginning to see some of these impacts.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“You and I can be a part of the Next Great Generation. We can save Earth—for us. Let’s get to work.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“if you don’t much care for regulation now, you might be in for a hard time. As climate change causes sea levels to rise, more and more people are going to get displaced. More and more people are going to want to come live where you are living—or worse, you will be among those forced to do the moving. Cities are going to need storm walls; farmers will need compensation to relocate their fields. If you think action on behalf of climate change is expensive, just wait until you see the price of inaction. Regulations will be required sooner or later, but if we wait until things reach crisis level they will be a lot more onerous. There may be requirements to restrict your use of gasoline. Requirements that restrict your access to proteins, such as steak and fish. Regulators watching what you put in the trash. There may be limits on shipping and air travel. And by then, your neighbors will probably be voting for these regulations. The environmental and just plain cash-money costs will be staggering the longer we go without getting going.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“the biggest perceived enemy of the U.S. is called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or alternatively the Islamic State of the Levant (ISIL). They are bent on taking over territory by means of terror. If the Western countries did not need the oil that these terrorists control, the money that ultimately funds their operations would dry up. They could no longer operate as a terrorist state,”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“Today there is a movement to require any device to use less than half a watt in standby mode. It’s the power that keeps your television tuner, or microwave oven, or coffeemaker’s clock running. With billions of appliances, we can easily waste hundreds of billions of watt-hours. This is sometimes called the “no-load” power loss or, what I prefer, the “vampire” loss. Each plugged-in plug has two prongs that are like the fangs of a vampire, sucking our electrical life’s blood out of us all. Bah, ha, ha, ha, ha … It seems like an important problem to address, and we have, to some extent. Having vampires suck half a watt instead of 10 or 15 watts represents great progress. Nevertheless, how about if it were a tenth of that half? We could have billions of kilowatt-hours available to us for free, without any other decisions about nuclear plants or wind-turbine sites.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“The distributed nature of solar energy is a problem only if you are thinking like a utility, trying to produce all of your power in one place. But it can be a good thing if you think about making every building into its own energy source, about making whole cities into their own grid, about bringing power to the billions who are not hooked up to the grid at all. Just thinking about a space-based solar power system highlights (pun intended) that solar power’s weaknesses from an old-style industrial perspective may be its strength in the Next Great Generation’s point of view.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“We have to reengineer our technology, energy source by energy source—the things we really can control—not try to reengineer the whole planet. Our unintentional effect on the planet is how we got into this mess in the first place. We have to learn how to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics and find brilliant new ways of making energy without drowning in carbon.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“People who should (or do) know better keep confusing weather with climate. Weather is what happens day to day in one place. Climate is what happens over many years to a large geographic area, or the planet as a whole.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“The carbon fee would raise the cost of the things you buy (since right now there is some carbon emitted in the production and distribution of pretty much everything). That’s a little less money in your pocket. But at the end of the year, the government would take all of the money collected by the carbon fee, divide it up, and give it back to you as a dividend check. By you, of course, I mean all of you. The government wouldn’t keep any of the money. All the fee would do is put a realistic price on the carbon we dump into the environment. Every factory, every company would have an incentive to reduce emissions, because then they could sell things at a lower price. Consumers, given a choice between a low-carbon pair of jeans and a high-carbon pair of jeans, would see a cost advantage in choosing the former. If you live a low-carbon lifestyle all year, when your dividend check arrives you will find that you came out ahead.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“The less we do to address climate change now, the more regulation we will have in the future.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“My parents’ generation started out working hard, focused on earning a living without much concern about creating trouble in the environment. They weren’t out to harm the planet; they simply were not aware of what they were doing, or of how they might do it differently. In the case of the Eastern Shore beaches, the old approach left a thick mess on the places they took their families to play. After some time, they came to see that the long-term quality of the environment is a more worthy priority than the short-term need to rinse out the insides of ship hulls cheap and easy. They realized that change was possible, that change was not even all that hard or expensive, and that one small improvement could make a big difference. They saw to it that the local waters got cleaned up. They left the beach a little better than they found it.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“The climate has always changed in the past and it will always change in the future. We just need to live with it.” I hear that sentiment, and variations on it, all the time. I also frequently hear people say, “We have to save Earth.” The two things sound like opposites, but they are actually two versions of the same colossal misconception that our primary concern is the well-being of the planet. We don’t need to save Earth; it is going to be here no matter what we do. And, we can’t ignore the way Earth is changing, because we stubbornly happen to live here. I encourage everyone to reject both of those sentiments and think instead, “We have to save Earth—for us! For us humans!”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“So why are we, any of us, still debating the reality of climate change? Why aren’t all of our political and business leaders joining the cry to rally the Next Greatest Generation to come up with some solutions? A key part of the problem is that many of our richest people made their fortunes in the fossil-fuel industry. To protect their wealth and businesses, they have turned to promoting denial. Conservative politicians get a great deal of their campaign contributions from fossil-fuel wealth, and they have been convinced to interchange the standard statements of scientific uncertainty (e.g. “plus-or-minus 3%”) to mean that we know nothing at all (i.e. “maybe the answer is minus 100%”). Conservative media outlets have obediently played along. This is wrong and dangerous.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“We refer to them as neutrons (neutral) and protons (positive). If the first is the customer, and the second is the bartender, the neutron asks, “Why didn’t I get a check?” The proton bartender replies, “For you, there’s no charge.” The neutron asks again, “Are you sure?” And the proton replies, “I’m positive!” See? Comedy is that simple …”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“The people who dismiss concerns about global warming seem to be the pessimists who would rather give up than own up to the problems we have all created. The people who worry most about what we are doing to the planet are the optimists who believe we also have the intelligence—we, as a species, working together—to come up with powerful solutions to the problems we’re working on that will change the world for the better. Which way of looking at the world is going to produce a Next Greatest Generation? Will it be the ones who give up, or the ones who get going? Making”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“Based on telescope observations of the solar system, astronomers now estimate that there are at least one hundred thousand Earth orbit–crossing asteroids comparable in size to the one that finished off the ancient dinosaurs. If any one of these hit our planet this afternoon, that would be the end of everything we know. We as a society have an opportunity. We could direct a small fraction of our intellect and treasure to identify the dangerous objects and then build a spacecraft capable of nudging one of these things safely off of a collision course. I’m talking about giving certain line items priority in, say, the NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Roscosmos, China National Space Agency, and JAXA (Japanese Exploration Agency) budgets. Detecting every single seriously dangerous object out there is perhaps a billion-dollar project. Put another way, it would cost the amount of money that the United States government spends every two hours. A two-hour investment could save all of humankind from the most unpleasant form of global change.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“In these other civilized countries they produce hot water tanks that have enough fittings, that is, enough inlets and outlets, to connect the tank to a solar collector on the roof of your house, garage, or tattoo parlor. The tank contains a gas-fired or electric-coil heater. When the Sun is not enough, the gas burner or the electric coil boost the heat going into the system. The water gets to the desired temperature one way or the other. This is a wonderfully logical way to do this job: Get as much insolation (sun heat) as you can. If it’s not enough, give the water a jolt of heat—a boost. Unfortunately, these sorts of tanks are not approved for use in the U.S.,”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“I can easily envision a future system in which all of our vehicles are autonomous, just like our electric grid and your refrigerator. You’d take out your smartphone and, Uber-style, summon an autonomous get-you-to-work vehicle. The autonomous vehicle company takes care of the car and sends you a bill for each ride. If those vehicles coordinated with each other the way our mobile phones and their communication cells do, and these robot cars were electric … oooh! We’d have far fewer car wrecks, less pollution, and more free time.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“Here’s hoping NASCAR officials and teams decide to do some new and cool things rather than the old and slow things. I hope NASCAR gets kids everywhere excited about innovating in automotive design, so that we can go farther on less fuel or even no fuel—just electrons—so that car exhaust is cleaner or nonexistent, so that we can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and make a better planet for all of us,”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“If we create a fee and dividend system in which we all paid a true cost of producing greenhouse gases, then the market can sort out the pros and cons. Then we can truly set our best minds, and our best technologies, free.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“If the American economy and American interests were not tied so directly to oil from overseas, U.S. diplomats and politicians could approach the rest of the world in new ways. They could eliminate a lot of military actions that have little benefit other than protecting the oil supply, and they could devote a lot more resources to improving the lives of citizens everywhere affected by climate change—including the citizens right here at home.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“catalytic converters were another public-works oriented, top-down regulated technology that many people thought would never work to clean up our air. In fact, they work splendidly. The people who once denounced catalytic converters as too expensive to put in our cars sound just like so many of our pro-business commentators today who insist that it will cost too much to address climate change.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

“I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.”
― Bill Nye, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World