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There’s always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there’s the greater possibility we’ll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.

Bill McKibben

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fossils Fuel Math
“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 MCKIBBEN

Future People Two
We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Add Events People
I did very much like [Barack] Obama’s attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we’ll try to push it forward.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Subsidies Trying
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Fuel Political Thinking
There 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 MCKIBBEN

Country New Past People
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
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
We’d like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Feet Fossils Fuel
[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coral Dying President Reefs
In the States we’ve had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Lasts Years
If you were running a solar company you may be okay – you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
BILL MCKIBBEN

Growing Running
All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Smart Squares Uprising
We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Creativity Movement Passion
Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Abundance Problem Use
I guess the underlying principle might be, don’t make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
BILL MCKIBBEN

might Principles Stereotype

There’s always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there’s the greater possibility we’ll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.

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There’s always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there’s the greater possibility we’ll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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