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I’m far less a leader than a writer.

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

Self Suicidal Thinking
Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Men Taken Years
we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Confusion Loneliness Use
I’m guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Technology Years
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

Growing Running
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
The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Green Home House
I’m probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Person Thinking Wrong
If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.
BILL MCKIBBEN

People Ties Wanted
Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fighting Important People
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

Coal Company Worry
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
In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Change Climate Reality
We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Add Events People
We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Damage Data Done
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
[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coral Dying President Reefs
The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Depth Example Hurricane
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
We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Christmas Giving Ties
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

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

Argument Global Thinking Warming
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
We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coal Ocean Pipeline
Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.
BILL MCKIBBEN

People Poor World
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
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

I’m far less a leader than a writer.

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I’m far less a leader than a writer.

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