We’ve been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone’s completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that’s too high. It’s not a very complicated idea.
BILL MCKIBBENThe fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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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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[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.
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I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth’s atmosphere at the moment.
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Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.
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Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.
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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.
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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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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.
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Oil companies are radical because they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
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we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
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The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
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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.
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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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In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We’ve seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .
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All 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 MCKIBBEN