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If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

Bill McKibben

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Couple Ice Years
It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet’s life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it’s very hard to understand why we haven’t taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Crazy Generation Our Taken
[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Growing Kids Up World
A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Future Long Running
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Colonialism Kind Slavery
If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Profit Wreckage Wrecks
We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Energy Use Way Work
At least I sure hope it will – and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Agriculture Least Locals Sure
The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Email Writing
There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coal Company Worry
I 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 MCKIBBEN

Buddhist Email Moving
Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Chemicals Oil
We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Creativity Movement Passion
Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Littles Movement Political
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Connection Movement
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Christmas Holiday Reflection
[Barack Obama] done some good things, he’s done a couple of bad things. He’s obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and… lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he’s been weak on it.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Couple Done Energy
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Air Ocean Summer
The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fire Helping World
Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Men Taken Years
Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Abundance Problem Use
My house is covered in solar panels, I’m a great believer in all this – we all should be doing this.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Believer House Should
There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don’t have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country New Past People
I 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 MCKIBBEN

Climate Denial Thinking
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Biodiversity Garden Sweet
Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Administration Counter Done Productive
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBEN

Balance Fuel Healthy

If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

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If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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