The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels – in fact you have to.
BILL MCKIBBENBut tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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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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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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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No one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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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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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
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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
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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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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.
BILL MCKIBBEN