You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
BILL MCKIBBENWhen you are in a hole, stop digging!
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
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The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels – in fact you have to.
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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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We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
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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.
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In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it’s more or less been over since 1995.
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We have to transition to new technologies, making it more expensive to continue with the old and polluting technologies and cheaper to go to the clean ones.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
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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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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.
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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.
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I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local – the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.
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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
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Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
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There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
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Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we’re doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.
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At least I sure hope it will – and I see good signs all the time, especially in things like the rise of local agriculture.
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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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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.
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TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
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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