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[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

Bill McKibben

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

Black People World
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

Comforting Thinking World
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBEN

Balance Fuel Healthy
The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they’re doing it for more reasons than we are.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Action Ideas India
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Christmas Holiday Reflection
I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
BILL MCKIBBEN

might Principles Stereotype
Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Abundance Problem Use
If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
BILL MCKIBBEN

College Degrees Guarantees
Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Couple Ice Years
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

Add Events People
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Political Thinking
Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Issues Real
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

Movement Needs Thinking
We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Creativity Movement Passion
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 Giving Ties
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

Degrees Twenties Years

[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

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[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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