Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
BILL MCKIBBENI’m not sure I’m a very good source of advice since we’re kind of making this up as we go along.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we’re seeing both in stunning abundance.
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[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.
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I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet’s history. We do a lot with art and music and things.
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There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
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[Barack Obama] done some good things, he’s done a couple of bad things. He’s obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and… lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he’s been weak on it.
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My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we’re converting to sun and wind. And it’s entirely a rate problem at this point.
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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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The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.
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Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.
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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.
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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?
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Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
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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.
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So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn’t seem like an enormous amount but it’s unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.
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I did very much like [Barack] Obama’s attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we’ll try to push it forward.
BILL MCKIBBEN