Bill McKibben Quotes

It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.

It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.

We’d won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren’t going to win.

I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.

We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.