black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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 try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Jobs Morning Optimistic
Advent: the time to listen for footsteps – you can’t hear footsteps when you’re running yourself.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Advent Christmas Country Running
There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Battle Fighting Important
If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Profit Wreckage Wrecks
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Colonialism Kind Slavery
We don’t know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we’re clearly reaching close to some of them.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Damage Tipping World
I’m far less a leader than a writer.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Leader Less Writer
I 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 MCKIBBEN

Self Suicidal Thinking
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Frozen Melting Temperature
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Challenges Important Tendencies
But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Laziness Moral Tolerance
What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Capable Creatures Different
I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Population Problem
Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we’d imagined.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Emergencies Stronger Thinking
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country People Years

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

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