Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
BILL MCKIBBENThe real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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If you were running a solar company you may be okay – you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
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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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Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
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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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In the States we’ve had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.
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Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.
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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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I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet’s history. We do a lot with art and music and things.
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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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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When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one’s figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that’s good.
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Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.
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“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
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Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.
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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.
BILL MCKIBBEN