I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.
BILL MCKIBBENBetween [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.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
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We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.
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The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
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We couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
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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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There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
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If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!
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Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
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We’ll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
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It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.
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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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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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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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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
![Bill McKibben Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/grey-between-speaker-of-the-house-paul-ryan-s.jpg)
![Bill McKibben Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/blue-between-speaker-of-the-house-paul-ryan-s.jpg)
![Bill McKibben Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/red-between-speaker-of-the-house-paul-ryan-s.jpg)
![Bill McKibben Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/brown-between-speaker-of-the-house-paul-ryan-s.jpg)
![Bill McKibben Quote - 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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/white-between-speaker-of-the-house-paul-ryan-s.jpg)

