David J. C. MacKay Quotes

To have constructive conversations about the world's energy options, one needs to take a calm look at the numbers.

The discussion about energy options tends to be an intensely emotional, polarised, mistrustful, and destructive one. Every option is strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal, anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrages, anti-carbon-tax, and anti-nuclear.

Fusion power is speculative and experimental. I think it is reckless to assume that the fusion problem will be cracked, but I'm happy to estimate how much power fusion could deliver, if the problems are cracked.

The only thing that really scales up apart from nuclear is solar power from other people's deserts.

I would like to help people have honest and constructive conversations about energy. We need to understand how much energy our modern lifestyles use, decide how much energy we would like to use in the future, and choose where we will get that energy from.

Electric cars are really very cool. Air-source heat pumps are great.

If all the ineffective ideas for solving the energy crisis were laid end to end, they would reach to the moon and back

I was distressed by the poor quality of the debate surrounding energy. I was also noticing so much green wash from politicians and big business. I was tired of the debate - the extremism, the nimbyism, the hair shirt. We need a constructive conversation about energy, not a Punch and Judy show. I just wanted to try to reboot the whole debate.

The bottom line in 2007 is that enrollment costs are going up substantially, drug coverage is declining and the brand name coverage in the doughnut hole is being eliminated ... Medicare D is an insurance program, not a benefit. As consumption increases, so too will cost. The changes in 2007 clearly demonstrate the limitations of the program.

All renewables, much as I love them, are diffuse. They all have a small power per unit area, and we have to live with that fact.

Most of physics is about energy, and physicists understand inefficiencies. I wanted to write a book about our energy options in a neutral, human-accessible form.

The United States consumes power per land-area at a rate three times the average. Even though they are more energy efficient, densely populated industrial countries like Germany, Britain and Japan have even bigger power consumption per area.

It sounded like a very loud vacuum cleaner behind us.

I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, 'Well, how much energy do you use at home?' And I was embarrassed. I didn't actually know.