James Lovelock

“We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century huma...”

“Le regard analytique et le regard intuitif sur la vie ne peuvent s'harmoniser dans un même être que dans la mesure où le premier est subordonné au second. C'est du second, et notamment du se...”

“Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.”

“Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it... Let's be pragmatic and...”

“If a power station were to be built down the road, I'd prefer a nuclear plant over an oil burner, and definitely over a coal burner. We simply have to lessen our consumption of fossil fuels.”

“China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.”

“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use... Th...”

“Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.”

“Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the d...”

“What I like about sceptics is that in good science you need critics that make you think: 'Crumbs, have I made a mistake here?' If you don't have that continuously, you really are up the cree...”

“NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space...”

“The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.”

“Climatologists are all agreed that we'd be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.”

“The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.”

“Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.”

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”

“I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.”

“There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.”

“Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.”

“I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn't surprise me at all.”