Bill McKibben Quotes

We’d like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.

The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they’re doing it for more reasons than we are.

Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say

I did very much like [Barack] Obama’s attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we’ll try to push it forward.

No one is strong enough – given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.