All 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 MCKIBBENThese new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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.
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I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
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Environmentalism, I’d always been told, was just rich white people.
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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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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
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Climate 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.
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Where people aren’t as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it’s far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they’re much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They’re ready to go.
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The movers and shakers on our planet, aren’t the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.
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On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.
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I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
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For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer’s drought provides a small taste.
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A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
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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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[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