There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
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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My house is covered in solar panels, I’m a great believer in all this – we all should be doing this.
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The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
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In fact, corporations are the infants of our society – they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.
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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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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.
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[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.
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TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
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[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.
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I don’t think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don’t want to be involved in this enterprise.
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We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
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But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don’t think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we’re now shifting the planet.
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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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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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There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
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The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
BILL MCKIBBEN