A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
BILL MCKIBBENA voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
BILL MCKIBBENIce in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that’s over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world’s people.
BILL MCKIBBENTo me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.
BILL MCKIBBENI don’t spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don’t think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they’re based in ideology. And I don’t think there’s anything you can do.
BILL MCKIBBENI 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 MCKIBBENI think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There’s real hunger out there.
BILL MCKIBBENCertainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
BILL MCKIBBENI guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
BILL MCKIBBENTo 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 MCKIBBENYou can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBENI 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.
BILL MCKIBBENBetween [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 MCKIBBENOil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
BILL MCKIBBENClimate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.
BILL MCKIBBENThe ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
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