I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
BILL MCKIBBENWe had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
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A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.
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We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
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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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Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
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I’m probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.
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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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I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
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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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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth’s atmosphere at the moment.
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If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
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I’m guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.
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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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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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We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.
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There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don’t have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
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It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we’re the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide.
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In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We’ve seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .
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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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Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
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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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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
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Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
BILL MCKIBBEN