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[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.

Bill McKibben

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

Argument Global Thinking Warming
We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity
BILL MCKIBBEN

Becoming Late Trying
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
Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Needs Powerful Real
We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Energy Use Way Work
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
The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels – in fact you have to.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Addresses Levels Numbers
In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: ‘free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren’t solving global warming, QED global warming is not a problem’. It’s not a very good syllogism but it’s emotionally comforting if you’re in that world.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Comforting Thinking World
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
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
We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Creativity Movement Passion
The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Chemistry Hands Real
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Fuel Waste
If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
BILL MCKIBBEN

College Degrees Guarantees
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBEN

Balance Fuel Healthy
After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor – surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Animal Lifetime Magazine
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Running Stress Thinking
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
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
There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Battle Fighting Important
Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Chemicals Oil
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 don’t spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don’t think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they’re based in ideology. And I don’t think there’s anything you can do.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Denial Thinking
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 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
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Challenges Important Tendencies
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

[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.

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[Kids] will grow up into a world that’s difficult and wonderful, and they’ll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill McKibben Quotes