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.
BILL MCKIBBENI think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
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We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
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Environmentalism, I’d always been told, was just rich white people.
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No one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.
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To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.
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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
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TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
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For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer’s drought provides a small taste.
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If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.
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Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say
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Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we’re seeing both in stunning abundance.
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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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We couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
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My house is covered in solar panels, I’m a great believer in all this – we all should be doing this.
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Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.
BILL MCKIBBEN







