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To me, it’s more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there’s a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.

Bill McKibben

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
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
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
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
If the Holy Spirit is capable of the heavy lifting required to get Pat Robertson to change his mind, then that strikes me as a very good sign.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Holy Mind Spirit
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
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
There are so many symptoms of this disease it’s hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology – on the way water moves around the planet.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Looks Moving Water
Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Administration Counter Done Productive
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Istanbul Real Thinking
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

Community Facts Purpose
We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Christmas Giving Ties
Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Kids Looks Perfect
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
BILL MCKIBBEN

Change Climate Digging Hole
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
We’re going to need that kind of movement, because the fossil fuel industry is a sprawling adversary – at work everywhere, its tentacles in everybody’s politics, invulnerable, I think, to direct frontal assault, but probably more brittle than it guesses if we come at it from all sides.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Movement Needs Thinking

To me, it’s more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there’s a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.

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To me, it’s more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there’s a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill McKibben Quotes