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 MCKIBBENAll the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
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The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
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Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
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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.
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I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
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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.
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My house is covered in solar panels, I’m a great believer in all this – we all should be doing this.
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To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.
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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.
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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.
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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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.
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I don’t think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don’t want to be involved in this enterprise.
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We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
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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