The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.

Most of the energy in North America is just consuming - Wal-Mart, shopping centres, government offices - or personal consumption: houses, cars, flying to Hawaii, gambling in Las Vegas. We could live affluent lifestyles with half as much energy.

You cannot increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. We improve the performance of farms by irrigating them and fertilizing them to provide all these nutrients. But we cannot keep on doubling the yield every two years. Moore's law doesn't apply to plants.

Exceptional circumstances can accelerate the gradual process of energy transitions: France's decision to develop nuclear energy on a grand scale is perhaps the best example of how that can be done by government fiat. In contrast, America's accelerated shift from coal has been driven by an inevitable embrace of cheaper natural gas.

America tends to assume Silicon Valley-style innovators can drive quick and transformative changes, but even Silicon Valley's would-be masters of the universe have discovered that energy transitions are subject to time spans and technical constraints that defy their reach.

No human civilization could ever sever our dependence on photosynthesis.

The problems that ail the U.S. economy and American society are one and the same: Both consume too much and refuse to make badly needed changes. This is true above all in the realm of energy.

I wouldn't put a big trust in what people in Silicon Valley say. They may be good at manipulating ones and zeroes and writing software, but beyond that, their contribution to human progress has been pretty dismal. I'm not impressed.

Canadians are hardly assertive or demanding. We don't expect U.S. presidents to bow down to our prime ministers when they visit us in Ottawa, nor are we looking for the occasional kickback on an F-16 deal.

Mass adoption of renewable energies would thus necessitate a fundamental reshaping of modern energy infrastructures.

We insist on celebrating lone heroic path-finders, but even the most admired and the most successful inventors are part of a more remarkable supply chain of innovators who are largely ignored for the simpler mythology of one man or one eureka moment.

I appreciate and love blue-green algae.

Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food.

Some countries that grow lots of pork, like Denmark and the Netherlands, are either eliminating antibiotics or reducing them. We have to do that. Otherwise we'll create such antibiotic resistance, it will be just terrible.

We're a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.

Meat eaters don't like me because I call for moderation, and vegetarians don't like me because I say there's nothing wrong with eating meat. It's part of our evolutionary heritage! Meat has helped to make us what we are. Meat helps to make our big brains.

The history of energy use is a sequence of transitions to sources that are cheaper, cleaner, and more flexible.

Economic and technical imperatives - not any preconceived directives - will keep propelling the process of energy transition.

When you talk in terms of electricity, renewable is very important. Hydro in Manitoba. Hydro in Sweden. Wind in Denmark. Of course, those are very important.

I really don't think I have anything special to say.

Your past always leads to who you are.

I am probably one of the last people on the planet without a cell phone.

All I want is to be left alone to write my books.

Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.

I'm the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.

U.S. industries from steel-making to plastics synthesis are among the world's most energy-efficient; American agriculture is highly productive, as are America's railroads. But for decades, Americans themselves have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their houses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway products on credit.

There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat, whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth.

Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food. Large animals have inherently low efficiency of converting feed to muscle, and only modern broilers can be produced with less than two units of feed per unit of meat.

Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.

A brilliant mind having a eureka moment could not create an Intel microprocessor containing a billion transistors any more than one person could dream up a Boeing 787 from scratch.

People shouldn't be living in certain places - on earthquake faults or on flood plains. But they do, and there are consequences.