When we work all over the planet, it’s mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that’s mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.
BILL MCKIBBENThe idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they’re doing it for more reasons than we are.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.
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It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
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We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
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I’m far less a leader than a writer.
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To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.
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It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.
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Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
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The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they’re doing it for more reasons than we are.
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If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
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We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.
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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.
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We’ll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
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The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.
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Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.
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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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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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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.
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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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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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There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
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Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
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On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.
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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
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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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I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.
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We’ve been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone’s completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that’s too high. It’s not a very complicated idea.
BILL MCKIBBEN