For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer’s drought provides a small taste.
BILL MCKIBBENThe Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we’re the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide.
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We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
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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.
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A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.
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My house is covered in solar panels, I’m a great believer in all this – we all should be doing this.
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We’d like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.
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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.
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I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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“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.
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I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There’s real hunger out there.
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Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
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There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
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I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
BILL MCKIBBEN