Robert Bryce > Quotes

“Averting the looming (pick your favorite term) catastrophe, time bomb, crisis, or emergency, requires us to hew to their worldview, one in which we humans are the problem and the Earth is the object to be saved. The biggest and most influential environmental groups routinely preach a message of doom. They regularly claim, for instance, that technology is dangerous (their opposition to nuclear and GMOs are obvious examples of this mindset) and that industrial development must be stopped in order to the save the planet. However, the painful paradox is that they are aiming to stop many of the innovations that are helping to improve the environment and raise the living standards of millions of people. They are also promoting energy policies that would be ruinous for the environment they say they want to protect.”
― Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong

“Utilizing wind energy to fuel data centers would be equally problematic. To demonstrate that, consider the Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, which needs 28 megawatts of power.46 The areal power density of wind energy—and it doesn’t matter where you put your wind turbines—is 1 watt per square meter.47 (I will address wind energy in a later chapter.) Therefore, just to fuel the Facebook data center with wind will require about 28 million square meters of land.”
― Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong

“Nordhaus and Shellenberger called this view “nihilistic ecotheology.” That worldview, they said, comprises “apocalyptic fears of ecological collapse, disenchanting notions of living in a fallen world, and the growing conviction that some kind of collective sacrifice is needed to avoid the end of the world.” The eco-nihilists have “nostalgic visions of a transcendent future in which humans might, once again, live in harmony with nature through a return to small-scale agriculture, or even to hunter-gatherer life.”
― Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong

“Using the official $1 per day line, we estimate that [from 1970 to 2006] world poverty rates have fallen by 80 percent.”
― Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong

“In April 2012, Greenpeace spotlighted the issue of power demand in data centers in the report “How Clean Is Your Cloud?”
― Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong

“As Anderson cleared maps and other papers from the table adjacent to his desk, I asked him for the heat content of the coal. His reply: about 12,500 Btu (British thermal units)”
― Robert Bryce, Power Hungry: The Myths of ""Green"" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future

“Agency (EPA) estimates that coal-fired power plants account “for over 40% of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions.” Furthermore, the EPA says, “about one quarter of US emissions from coal-burning power plants are deposited within the contiguous US and the remainder enters the global cycle.”6 In addition, the ash that comes out of coal-fired power plants is usually contaminated with heavy metals.”
― Robert Bryce, Power Hungry: The Myths of ""Green"" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future

“Over the past century and a half, we’ve gone from harnessing animals—and enduring all the shit they shat—to harnessing the subatomic motion of electrons.”
― Robert Bryce, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations

“The results were obvious: as more horses were put to work, their need for grain increased. And that put them in direct competition with humans. By the early 1900s, as much as 20 percent of all US farmland was being used to cultivate grain solely for horse feed.5”
― Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong