We don’t know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we’re clearly reaching close to some of them.
BILL MCKIBBENEverything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.
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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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So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn’t seem like an enormous amount but it’s unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.
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I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
I’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 MCKIBBEN -
There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
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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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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 -
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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Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.
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There’s always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there’s the greater possibility we’ll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.
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In 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?”
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When you are in a hole, stop digging!
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When we work all over the planet, it’s mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that’s mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.
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We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
BILL MCKIBBEN