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We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

Bill McKibben

In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it’s more or less been over since 1995.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Facts Purpose
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Argument Global Thinking Warming
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

Needs Rain Weather
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Peace Technology
we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Confusion Loneliness Use
But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Laziness Moral Tolerance
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 MCKIBBEN

Business Energy Use Way Work
Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Kids Looks Perfect
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

Important People Trying
I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Jobs Morning Optimistic
Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump’s team, I don’t see a lot of openings for making real progress.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Leader Majority Real Team
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Running Stress Thinking
We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fossils Fuel Math
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Biodiversity Garden Sweet
If you were running a solar company you may be okay – you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
BILL MCKIBBEN

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

might Principles Stereotype

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

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We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

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