[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 MCKIBBENI think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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We’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.
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It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we’re the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide.
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There are so many symptoms of this disease it’s hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology – on the way water moves around the planet.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
To 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 MCKIBBEN -
Environmentalism, I’d always been told, was just rich white people.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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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When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
We’ve been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone’s completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that’s too high. It’s not a very complicated idea.
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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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Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.
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It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.
BILL MCKIBBEN