I did very much like [Barack] Obama’s attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we’ll try to push it forward.
BILL MCKIBBENeveryone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between “good weather” and “bad weather” is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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.
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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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[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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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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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.
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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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Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.
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Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump’s team, I don’t see a lot of openings for making real progress.
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I’m far less a leader than a writer.
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The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
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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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Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we’d imagined.
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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
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We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
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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.
BILL MCKIBBEN