All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
BILL MCKIBBENWe can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
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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Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.
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But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
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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.
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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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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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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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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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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.
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Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.
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Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we’d imagined.
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Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
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Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
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It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
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To me, it’s more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there’s a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.
BILL MCKIBBEN