There’s always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there’s the greater possibility we’ll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.
BILL MCKIBBENTV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
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I don’t spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don’t think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they’re based in ideology. And I don’t think there’s anything you can do.
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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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I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There’s real hunger out there.
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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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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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Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.
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We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
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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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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’ve been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone’s completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that’s too high. It’s not a very complicated idea.
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When we work all over the planet, it’s mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that’s mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.
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I’m far less a leader than a writer.
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We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They’ve got the big checkbooks. We’ve got to have the big crowd.
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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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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 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’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
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Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.
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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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There are so many symptoms of this disease it’s hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology – on the way water moves around the planet.
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Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.
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Advent: the time to listen for footsteps – you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
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Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
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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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I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
BILL MCKIBBEN