Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.
BILL MCKIBBENGlobal warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.
BILL MCKIBBENThere is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don’t have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
BILL MCKIBBENThe Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.
BILL MCKIBBENI 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.
BILL MCKIBBENTo 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“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
BILL MCKIBBENIce in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that’s over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world’s people.
BILL MCKIBBENwe use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
BILL MCKIBBENI 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 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.
BILL MCKIBBENThe technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
BILL MCKIBBENEnvironmentalism, I’d always been told, was just rich white people.
BILL MCKIBBEN[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 MCKIBBENThere are so many symptoms of this disease it’s hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology – on the way water moves around the planet.
BILL MCKIBBENIn reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
BILL MCKIBBENThere are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
BILL MCKIBBEN