A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.
BILL MCKIBBENTV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
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The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.
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A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.
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Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
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We couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
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At least I sure hope it will – and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture.
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It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we’re the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide.
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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
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I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.
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Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.
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I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth’s atmosphere at the moment.
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I can’t tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they’re stepping up to be part of the solution.
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The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we’ll dawdle.
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We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
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The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
BILL MCKIBBEN