What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
BILL MCKIBBENIt’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
-
-
My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we’re converting to sun and wind. And it’s entirely a rate problem at this point.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say
BILL MCKIBBEN -
We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
In certain ways, I think the work in the Evangelical community has been the most interesting and the most promising. Partly because Evangelical congregations may be harder to convince about issues but, on the other hand, are more likely to do something about it.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
BILL MCKIBBEN -
Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we’re doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local – the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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?”
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
[Barack Obama] done some good things, he’s done a couple of bad things. He’s obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and… lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he’s been weak on it.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
I can’t tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they’re stepping up to be part of the solution.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
BILL MCKIBBEN