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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.
Bill McKibben
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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
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Palo Alto
California
Humans
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Real
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Physics
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More quotes by Bill McKibben
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
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
Bill McKibben
We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
Bill McKibben
The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.
Bill McKibben
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.
Bill McKibben
Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
Bill McKibben
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.
Bill McKibben
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.
Bill McKibben
We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.
Bill McKibben
We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.
Bill McKibben
My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.
Bill McKibben
At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.
Bill McKibben
The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
Bill McKibben
Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.
Bill McKibben
It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
Bill McKibben
I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.
Bill McKibben
We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.
Bill McKibben
We're putting more carbon into the atmosphere than the atmosphere can absorb. And everybody told us when we started, coz we knew nothing when we started - we still don't know very much - but everybody told us 'this is crazy, you don't use a scientific data point, it's a number, people don't respond to numbers'.
Bill McKibben
All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
Bill McKibben
Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.
Bill McKibben
