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Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say

Bill McKibben

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Easy Half Make Tvs
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Christmas Holiday Reflection
We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Energy Use Way Work
I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Jobs Morning Optimistic
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Moving Needs Years
Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Chemicals Oil
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

Important People Trying
If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.
BILL MCKIBBEN

People Ties Wanted
If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!
BILL MCKIBBEN

Environmental Growth Thinking
The latest computer modeling I’ve seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as “environmental refugees.”
BILL MCKIBBEN

Environmental might People
After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor – surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Animal Lifetime Magazine
I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth’s atmosphere at the moment.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Justice Thinking
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 imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Connection Movement
In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it’s more or less been over since 1995.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Facts Purpose
we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Confusion Loneliness Use
We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity
BILL MCKIBBEN

Becoming Late Trying
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
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Istanbul Real Thinking
The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fire Helping World
There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Battle Fighting Important
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Thinking Want
We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Damage Data Done
We’d won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren’t going to win.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fighting Winning Years
All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Lasts Years
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Electricity Meter Sun
Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Men Taken Years

Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say

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Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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