Bill McKibben Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?"

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.