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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.

Bill McKibben

“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Future People Two
We have to transition to new technologies, making it more expensive to continue with the old and polluting technologies and cheaper to go to the clean ones.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Clean Technology Transition
I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Needs Thinking
Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Rich Countries Two
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Fuel Waste
The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Email Writing
Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we’re seeing both in stunning abundance.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Air Warm Water Years
Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.
BILL MCKIBBEN

People Poor World
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Comforting Thinking World
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

Cliffs Crisis Euro Years
The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fire Helping World
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Movement Needs Thinking
I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Running Stress Thinking
In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We’ve seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Epic Years
I’m far less a leader than a writer.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Leader Less Writer
What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Capable Creatures Different

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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