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.
BILL MCKIBBENI did very much like [Barack] Obama’s attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we’ll try to push it forward.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They’ve got the big checkbooks. We’ve got to have the big crowd.
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In certain ways, I think the work in the Evangelical community has been the most interesting and the most promising. Partly because Evangelical congregations may be harder to convince about issues but, on the other hand, are more likely to do something about it.
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I don’t think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don’t want to be involved in this enterprise.
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I think fracking for gas will reduce the incentive to turn to renewables, and I think it will do a lot of other damage across the countryside.
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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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If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.
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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy 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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The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.
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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.
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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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Advent: the time to listen for footsteps – you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
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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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The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.
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I don’t spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don’t think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they’re based in ideology. And I don’t think there’s anything you can do.
BILL MCKIBBEN