You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBENClimate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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?
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“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
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If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
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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.
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There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
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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 thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels – in fact you have to.
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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.
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But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
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What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
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We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They’ve got the big checkbooks. We’ve got to have the big crowd.
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Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
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A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.
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TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
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There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
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[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
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The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
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There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
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I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet’s history. We do a lot with art and music and things.
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The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
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We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
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I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
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Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
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I’m not sure I’m a very good source of advice since we’re kind of making this up as we go along.
BILL MCKIBBEN