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But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

Bill McKibben

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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Mistake Problem World
I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Population Problem
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Biodiversity Garden Sweet
In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Change Climate Reality
Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Energy Fossils Fuel
Environmentalism, I’d always been told, was just rich white people.
BILL MCKIBBEN

People Rich White
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Chemistry Hands Real
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

Ideas Numbers Oxford
The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Depth Example Hurricane
We don’t know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we’re clearly reaching close to some of them.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Damage Tipping World
Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we’d imagined.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Emergencies Stronger 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
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Attitude Powerful Thinking
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country People Years
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
[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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coral Dying President Reefs

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

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But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

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