We couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
BILL MCKIBBENWe couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
BILL MCKIBBENThere is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBENAdvent: the time to listen for footsteps – you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
BILL MCKIBBENAll 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.
BILL MCKIBBENIn reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
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.
BILL MCKIBBENWe’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 MCKIBBENI think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth’s atmosphere at the moment.
BILL MCKIBBEN[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 MCKIBBENAll 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.
BILL MCKIBBENThere is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBENNo one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.
BILL MCKIBBENWe’d like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.
BILL MCKIBBENI’m probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.
BILL MCKIBBENIn 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”
BILL MCKIBBENWe’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.
BILL MCKIBBEN