The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they’re doing it for more reasons than we are.
BILL MCKIBBENWarm 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.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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.
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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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No one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.
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There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
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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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we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
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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.
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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.
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everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between “good weather” and “bad weather” is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.
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Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.
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The latest computer modeling I’ve seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as “environmental refugees.”
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It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.
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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.
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A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.
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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