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Bill McKibben Quotes

American author and environmentalist, Birth: 8-12-1960 Bill McKibben Quotes
1.
Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.
Bill McKibben

2.
There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
Bill McKibben

3.
The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.
Bill McKibben

4.
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
Bill McKibben

5.
You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.
Bill McKibben

Similar Authors: Rush Limbaugh Cassandra Clare Charles Spurgeon Deepak Chopra Stephen King George Bernard Shaw Winston Churchill Neil Gaiman Richelle Mead Jodi Picoult Francois de La Rochefoucauld Marianne Williamson Wayne Dyer Michel de Montaigne Victor Hugo
6.
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
Bill McKibben

7.
These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us - it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to this problem. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet. We've never figured out, though God knows we've tried, a more effective way to destroy their lives.
Bill McKibben

8.
what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.
Bill McKibben

Quote Topics by Bill McKibben: Thinking People Years Climate Real Country Fuel World Fighting Energy Needs Ice Numbers Important Data Political Community Done Ocean Oil Atmosphere Long Global Warming Taken Problem Moving Water Issues Summer Ideas
9.
In fact, corporations are the infants of our society - they know very little except how to grow (though they're very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It's about time we took it up again.
Bill McKibben

10.
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?"
Bill McKibben

11.
Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.
Bill McKibben

12.
Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
Bill McKibben

13.
We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.
Bill McKibben

14.
A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
Bill McKibben

15.
If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.
Bill McKibben

16.
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.
Bill McKibben

17.
We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
Bill McKibben

18.
We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.
Bill McKibben

19.
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
Bill McKibben

20.
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

21.
In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
Bill McKibben

22.
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.
Bill McKibben

23.
In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.
Bill McKibben

24.
Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.
Bill McKibben

25.
Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.
Bill McKibben

26.
My goal was to have as many of the primary sources as I could made available for people to look at and understand. Climate change is probably the most important thing that's ever happened, and yet people's understanding of it and its history remains a little fuzzy.
Bill McKibben

27.
A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.
Bill McKibben

28.
Everybody was cratered after Copenhagen. If the movie had worked the way that it should have, if it had been scripted by Holywood, the world would have come together and addressed the biggest problem it ever had faced and delegates would have embraced each other, and it all would have been a good happy scene instead of the complete farce and debacle that it turned into - maybe in certain ways, an absolute low point for human diplomacy.
Bill McKibben

29.
One of my favorite places is the Maldives, an all-Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean with a culture that stretches back 5,000 years. But since the highest point in the archipelago is a meter or two above sea level, even the next hundred are not guaranteed. They've committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth by 2020, building windmills as fast as they can.
Bill McKibben

30.
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
Bill McKibben

31.
We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.
Bill McKibben

32.
The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.
Bill McKibben

33.
We've lost half the summer sea ice in the Arctic. We've wiped out an enormous percentage of the world's coral reefs. We see huge changes in the planet's hydrology already, the cycles of drought and flood both amped up because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. These things are happening with a one-degree increase and going to two degrees won't be twice as bad, the increase in damage won't be linear, it most certainly will be exponential. So it was precisely the wrong moment to elect Trump.
Bill McKibben

34.
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.
Bill McKibben

35.
We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.
Bill McKibben

36.
A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.
Bill McKibben

37.
Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem.
Bill McKibben

38.
everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.
Bill McKibben

39.
What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
Bill McKibben

40.
A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
Bill McKibben

41.
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
Bill McKibben

42.
All the things that we've done as a species have had a limited scope. We're talking about melting the ice caps, raising the level of the seas dramatically, changing the distribution of every other species on Earth, perhaps wiping out one-third or half of them. The changes at work are geologic in scale. The level of change required to deal with it is enormous, too. It will require change in every country. It will require a degree of global cooperation that we haven't seen before.
Bill McKibben

43.
There's no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
Bill McKibben

44.
If you look at the polling data, long before anyone had thought about Iraq, it was the [George W.] Bush Administration's decision in the first few weeks in its tenure in office to abnegate the Kyoto treaties that set our international perception into a nose-dive. People around the world looked on in amazement as the biggest part of the problem decided it wasn't going to make any effort to help with the solution.
Bill McKibben

45.
I can't tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they're stepping up to be part of the solution.
Bill McKibben

46.
what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.
Bill McKibben

47.
For the first time in 150 years, the USDA reported there were more farms in America, not fewer. That has to make you happy.
Bill McKibben

48.
The irony is that one of the things people want to solve climate change is more market - more price on carbon so that markets have something to chew on when they think about climate change instead of the complete monopoly, the absurdity of allowing these guys to own the sky for free - socialise all of the costs and privatise all of the profits.
Bill McKibben

49.
Other thing we need to understand is that the financial power of the fossil fuel industry has so far prevented even any minor progress. They have a sweetheart deal unlike any other business on Earth: they're allowed to dispose of their waste for free, to use the atmosphere as an open sewer. And they will do all they can to defend that special privilege.
Bill McKibben

50.
I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former.
Bill McKibben