We utilize energy from carbon, not because we are bad people, but because it is the affordable foundation on which the profound improvements in our standard of living have been achieved - our progress in health and welfare.

I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol.

[W]e are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal (think of life before modernity). On the contrary, we are good people for doing so.

We utilize energy from carbon, not because we are bad people, but because it is the affordable foundation on which the profound improvements in our standard of living have been achieved - our progress in health and welfare.

I've often heard it said that there's a consensus of thousands of scientists on the global warming issue and that humans are causing a catastrophic change to the climate system. Well I am one scientist, and there are many that simply think that is not true.

If you choose to make regulations about carbon dioxide, that's OK. You as a state can do that; you have a right to do it. But it's not going to do anything about the climate. And it's going to cost, there's no doubt about that."

...it is fairly well agreed that the surface temperature will rise about 1°C as a modest response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 if the rest of the component processes of the climate system remain independent of this response.