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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.

Bill McKibben

We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They’ve got the big checkbooks. We’ve got to have the big crowd.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Leader Scare Way
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 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 MCKIBBEN

Climate Action Ideas India
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
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Argument Global Thinking Warming
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
All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Smart Squares Uprising
Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump’s team, I don’t see a lot of openings for making real progress.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Leader Majority Real Team
We couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fossils Fuel Money More
No one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Games Strong Tasks
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Future Long Running
TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country Easy Half Make Tvs
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
BILL MCKIBBEN

Change Climate Digging Hole
When we work all over the planet, it’s mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that’s mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Black People World
I can’t tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they’re stepping up to be part of the solution.
BILL MCKIBBEN

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

Challenges Important Tendencies

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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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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