The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
BILL MCKIBBENYou can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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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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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All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.
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everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between “good weather” and “bad weather” is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.
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Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.
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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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In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it’s more or less been over since 1995.
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In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: ‘free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren’t solving global warming, QED global warming is not a problem’. It’s not a very good syllogism but it’s emotionally comforting if you’re in that world.
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In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”
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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.
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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 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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The latest computer modeling I’ve seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as “environmental refugees.”
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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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Advent: the time to listen for footsteps – you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
BILL MCKIBBEN