Bill McKibben Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.

  Bill McKibben

  People, Events, Add

  Source: sierraclub.typepad.com

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• what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.

  Bill McKibben

  Zoos, Animal, Exotic

  Bill McKibben (2014). “The Age of Missing Information”, p.124, Random House

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• In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: 'free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren't solving global warming, QED global warming is not a problem'. It's not a very good syllogism but it's emotionally comforting if you're in that world.

  Bill McKibben

  Thinking, Comforting, World

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think.

  Bill McKibben

  Fighting, Gay, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I don't spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don't think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they're based in ideology. And I don't think there's anything you can do.

  Bill McKibben

  Thinking, Climate, Denial

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.

  Bill McKibben

  Rain, Weather, Needs

  Bill McKibben (1989). “The end of nature”, Random House Inc

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• Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we'd imagined.

  Bill McKibben

  Thinking, Stronger, Emergencies

  Source: sierraclub.typepad.com

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• Scientists had said, "If you keep burning coal and gas and oil, you will melt the Arctic." And then the Arctic melted just as they had predicted. Did Shell Oil look at the melt and say, "Huh, maybe we should go into the solar-panel business instead?" No, Shell Oil looked at that and said, "Oh, well, now that it's melted it will be easier to drill for more oil up there." That's enough to make you doubt about the big brain being a good adaptation.

  Bill McKibben

  Doubt, Brain, Adaptation

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.

  Bill McKibben

  Writing, Climate, Email

  Bill McKibben (2007). “Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community”, p.112, Macmillan

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• When we work all over the planet, it's mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that's mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.

  Bill McKibben

  People, Black, World

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.

  Bill McKibben

  Home, Worry, Important

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part.

  Bill McKibben

  Difficult, Impulse

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.

  Bill McKibben

  Wind, Fuel, Want

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor
  by giving each other motorized tie racks.

  Bill McKibben

  Christmas, Ties, Giving

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• We're going to need that kind of movement, because the fossil fuel industry is a sprawling adversary - at work everywhere, its tentacles in everybody's politics, invulnerable, I think, to direct frontal assault, but probably more brittle than it guesses if we come at it from all sides.

  Bill McKibben

  Thinking, Needs, Movement

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.

  Bill McKibben

  Appeals, Solar Power, Seems

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• [Barack Obama] done some good things, he's done a couple of bad things. He's obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and... lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he's been weak on it.

  Bill McKibben

  Couple, Energy, Done

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn't seem like an enormous amount but it's unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.

  Bill McKibben

  Years, Twenties, Degrees

  Source: theotherjournal.com

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• Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast.

  Bill McKibben

  School, Cities, Fuel

  "Donald Trump Is a Disaster for the Earth on Every Single Level". Interview with Julia Lurie, www.motherjones.com. November 11, 2016.

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• We'd already lost the possibility of stopping global warming entirely. That hasn't been in the cards for a long time. The triumph of Trump probably means that we're not going to be able to stop it at the two-degree mark that the world had been aiming for. That's very bad news, mostly because the planet seems to be more sensitive than we thought to even small increases in temperature.

  Bill McKibben

  Mean, Two, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.

  Bill McKibben

  Wish, Environmental, Global Warming

  Source: theotherjournal.com

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• Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.

  Bill McKibben

  Russia, Texas, Years

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• I've spent my life living in rural America, some of it in blue state Vermont, some of it in red state upstate New York. They're quite alike in many ways. And quite wonderful. It's important that even in an urbanized and suburbanized country, we continue to take rural America seriously. And the thing that makes Vermont in particular so special, and I hope this book captures some of it, is the basic underlying civility of its political life. That's rooted in the town meeting. Each of the towns in Vermont governs itself.

  Bill McKibben

  Country, Book, Political

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• To me, it's more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there's a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.

  Bill McKibben

  People, Important, Trying

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

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• Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.

  Bill McKibben

  Commitment, Justice, Overcoming

  Bill McKibben (2007). “Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community”, p.69, Macmillan

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