After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor – surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
BILL MCKIBBENIt now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
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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.
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Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
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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.
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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.
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I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
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When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one’s figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that’s good.
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On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.
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All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
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The latest computer modeling I’ve seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as “environmental refugees.”
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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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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.
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Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
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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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If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
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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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Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we’d imagined.
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We’ll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
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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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All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can’t substitute for real connection and community.
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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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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We couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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If the Holy Spirit is capable of the heavy lifting required to get Pat Robertson to change his mind, then that strikes me as a very good sign.
BILL MCKIBBEN