Top 30 Zac Goldsmith Quotes

If there was a time when ‘The Ecologist’ appeared not to be making a difference at all, not doing something useful, I wouldn’t do ‘The Ecologist,’ but I think it is useful.

I think sometimes if you are too interested in day-to-day politics, you lose sight of the long term.

The two million or so residents who live beneath the Heathrow flight path are accustomed to the noise. However, they are right to feel that any expansion would represent an unacceptable broken promise.

Green policy is about triggering a shift to a cleaner way of doing things. To be effective, it needs to incentivise the right behaviour, for example through tax breaks, and that needs to be paid for by disincentives on polluting behaviour.

Even Karaoke needs higher standards than I can reach, so I have gone great lengths to avoid being bullied into it.

A number of countries around the world, and indeed the E.U. as a whole, have chosen not to allow the import from the U.S. of beef from cows fed a diet that includes the hormone ractopamine, because of the fairly grave health concerns.

I wanted to weave a green thread through the Conservative party; that’s my job, and I signed up imagining that I would be in a very small minority within my party, possibly even on my own, battling away on these issues.

Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched ‘Living Marxism’ magazine in the late eighties.

We’ve all heard of the surveys revealing that teenagers think cows lay eggs, and others where children can identify more brand logos than trees, by a staggering margin. My view is that children will form a significant part of the green fightback. They instinctively understand the value of the environment.

The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure.

In North America, more than half of all children travel to school by bus. We need a similar programme in London.

There are clearly many good politicians who are guided by religious belief, so the mix can work. But there’s a line to be drawn. It would be hugely dangerous for a country’s laws to be set by the scriptures, and particularly those of the expansionist religions.

Politicians usually get the blame for dragging their feet on environmental issues. And fair enough. Most of them do just that. But the blame isn’t theirs alone. For politicians afraid of losing votes, a bristling media waiting to transform good green ideas into monsters is a colossal disincentive.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a rare phenomenon. Whereas for so many celebrities an interest in the environment is a fashionable accessory, for DiCaprio it is a thread that runs through everything he does.

Some of the world’s most appalling abuses have been justified by religion because it is possible for people to find vindication in their scriptures for any of their prejudices.

I don’t know David Cameron very well. I like him. I think you can judge a book by its cover – whoever said you can’t is wrong – that’s the whole point of nature giving us intuition, instinct and so on. I think the cover is pretty good.

I do not organize my private life with an eye to my career.

By uploading 40 years of ‘Ecologist’ editions online, we will be creating the world’s most extensive ecological archive. ‘The Ecologist’ will continue to set the environmental and political agenda here and abroad.

I am cynical about politicians. My experience of politicians has been thoroughly negative. I have found that politicians are people that can not be taken at face value. There are very few politicians I have been impressed with.

GM has never been about feeding the world or tackling environmental problems. It is and has always been about control of the global food economy by a tiny handful of giant corporations. It’s not wicked to question that process. It is wicked not to.

Yes, Heathrow is the U.K.’s busiest airport, but new runways or a new airport are not the answer. It is far better to focus on improving capacity.

If you tell people, ‘that old banger of yours, we’re going to tax the hell out of it,’ they’ll rightly tell you to get lost. But if you tell people that when they next buy a car, the tax will be adjusted so that the cleanest ones will cost less and the polluting ones will cost more, most people would say ‘fair enough.’

If we want to preserve Heathrow’s hub status, we need to stop clogging it up with point-to-point flights to places such as Cyprus and Greece, which between them account for 87 weekly flights, and contribute nothing to overall connectivity.

More than half the world’s largest 100 economies are corporations. They have no loyalties to place or citizens.

A pound invested in energy efficiency buys seven times more energy solution than a pound invested in nuclear power.

More passengers fly in and out of London than any other city in the world. We are well-connected, we have ample capacity, and we are starting from a position of strength. The problem is that we don’t use that capacity well.

Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early ’90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

Anyone driving through London after the school term ends will notice immediately how much easier it is to get around. The school run contributes massively to congestion.

‘Green’ cannot be allowed to become an excuse for stealth taxes. And nor should ‘green taxes’ be about punishment. Instead, they should represent a switch of emphasis. So if domestic flights are taxed, it should be on the absolute condition that the money is ploughed into improving the alternatives, such as trains.