If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
BILL MCKIBBENIn 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.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.
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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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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
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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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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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All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
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Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.
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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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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.
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The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
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These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
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What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
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We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
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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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All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can’t substitute for real connection and community.
BILL MCKIBBEN