The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
BILL MCKIBBENWe couldn’t outspend the fossil fuel industry – they have more money than God.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
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Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
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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.
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My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we’re converting to sun and wind. And it’s entirely a rate problem at this point.
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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.
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But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don’t think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we’re now shifting the planet.
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I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There’s real hunger out there.
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Advent: the time to listen for footsteps – you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
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The 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.
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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.
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Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.
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All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can’t substitute for real connection and community.
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We’ll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
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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.
BILL MCKIBBEN