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.
BILL MCKIBBEN[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.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
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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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Ice 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.
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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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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 -
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
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I think fracking for gas will reduce the incentive to turn to renewables, and I think it will do a lot of other damage across the countryside.
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We have to transition to new technologies, making it more expensive to continue with the old and polluting technologies and cheaper to go to the clean ones.
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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.
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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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Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we’re seeing both in stunning abundance.
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Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
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We’d won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren’t going to win.
BILL MCKIBBEN