In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”
BILL MCKIBBENThe thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels – in fact you have to.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
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 -
My house is covered in solar panels, I’m a great believer in all this – we all should be doing this.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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 -
There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
To me, it’s more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there’s a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
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 -
I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
BILL MCKIBBEN -
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
BILL MCKIBBEN