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For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer’s drought provides a small taste.

Bill McKibben

In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”
BILL MCKIBBEN

Cliffs Crisis Euro Years
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
I’m guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Technology Years
A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Ability Desire Style
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Running Stress Thinking
When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one’s figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that’s good.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Electricity Meter Sun
We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity
BILL MCKIBBEN

Becoming Late Trying
Environmentalism, I’d always been told, was just rich white people.
BILL MCKIBBEN

People Rich White
I’m probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Person Thinking Wrong
A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Carbon Citizens Currents
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Divergent Law Yield
When we work all over the planet, it’s mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that’s mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Black People World
From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Tiny Years
Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump’s team, I don’t see a lot of openings for making real progress.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Leader Majority Real Team
If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Profit Wreckage Wrecks
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Atmosphere Justice Thinking

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer’s drought provides a small taste.

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Popular Authors

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer’s drought provides a small taste.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill McKibben Quotes