Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that’s over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world’s people.
BILL MCKIBBENIn certain ways, I think the work in the Evangelical community has been the most interesting and the most promising. Partly because Evangelical congregations may be harder to convince about issues but, on the other hand, are more likely to do something about it.
More Bill McKibben Quotes
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The world is on fire, and I’m doing my best to help steer the firetruck.
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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.
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To me the analogy [to climate change] is… doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says “oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised” people pay no attention.
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The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.
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If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!
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We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
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The latest computer modeling I’ve seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as “environmental refugees.”
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Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
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I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
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We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
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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?”
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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 just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
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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