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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.

Bill McKibben

Related Topics

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More Bill McKibben Quotes

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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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• 

  To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.

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• 

  What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.

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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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  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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• 

  [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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• 

  At least I sure hope it will – and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture.

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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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  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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• 

  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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  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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  According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually

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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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  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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  From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.

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  The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.

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