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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.

Bill McKibben

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
If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Profit Wreckage Wrecks
There are so many symptoms of this disease it’s hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology – on the way water moves around the planet.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Looks Moving Water
$Bill McKibben Quote - It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.$

It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Happening Ice People
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
In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We’ve seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Epic Years
I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Running Stress Thinking
A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Facts Spiritual Voice
The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Green Home House
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
Where people aren’t as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it’s far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they’re much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They’re ready to go.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Energy People
From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Tiny Years
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
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
According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually
BILL MCKIBBEN

Balance Growth Research
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Divergent Law Yield
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Needs Powerful Real
There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coal Company Worry
In fact, corporations are the infants of our society – they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Corporations Littles Our Society
A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Carbon Citizens Currents
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 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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Add Events People
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Fuel Waste
The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Email Writing
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Self Suicidal Thinking
A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Air Ocean Summer
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill McKibben Quotes