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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 McKibben

But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don’t think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we’re now shifting the planet.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fighting Thinking Winning
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Biodiversity Garden Sweet
If you were running a solar company you may be okay – you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
BILL MCKIBBEN

Growing Running
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Challenges Important Tendencies
Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Rich Countries Two
Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we’re doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Addresses Facts Years
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
The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels – in fact you have to.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Addresses Levels Numbers
At least I sure hope it will – and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Agriculture Least Locals Sure
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
[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Growing Kids Up World
We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity
BILL MCKIBBEN

Becoming Late Trying
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
BILL MCKIBBEN

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

Profit Wreckage Wrecks
I’m probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Person Thinking Wrong
Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Insoluble Problem

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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