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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

On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Ice Ocean Water
Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Littles Movement Political
Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Issues 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
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
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBEN

Balance Fuel Healthy
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
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
It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet’s life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it’s very hard to understand why we haven’t taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Crazy Generation Our Taken
In certain ways, I think the work in the Evangelical community has been the most interesting and the most promising. Partly because Evangelical congregations may be harder to convince about issues but, on the other hand, are more likely to do something about it.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Hands Issues Thinking
In the States we’ve had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Lasts Years
Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Energy Names Weather
The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Ideas Long Oil
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Peace Technology
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Art Needs Thinking
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
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
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
I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Population Problem
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
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
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Needs Rain Weather
I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Jobs Morning Optimistic
$Bill McKibben Quote - My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we’re converting to sun and wind. And it’s entirely a rate problem at this point.$

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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Want Wind
Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we’d imagined.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Emergencies Stronger Thinking
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Community Connection Movement
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Political Thinking

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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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

More Bill McKibben Quotes