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 MCKIBBENI’m guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don’t have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
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[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.
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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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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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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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TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
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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.
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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
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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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When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one’s figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that’s good.
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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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There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
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Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump’s team, I don’t see a lot of openings for making real progress.
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Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
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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