We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
BILL MCKIBBENCertainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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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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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I’m not sure I’m a very good source of advice since we’re kind of making this up as we go along.
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The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we’ll dawdle.
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A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.
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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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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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Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.
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After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor – surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
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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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I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
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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.
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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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A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
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Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
BILL MCKIBBEN







