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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
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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Running
Wealthy
Place
Extremely
Long
Six
World
Population
Gets
Vision
Tenths
Poor
Tenth
Future
Stable
More quotes by Bill McKibben
For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.
Bill McKibben
There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
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I don't think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don't want to be involved in this enterprise.
Bill McKibben
There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward. And that's a difficult part.
Bill McKibben
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
The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
Bill McKibben
A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
Bill McKibben
It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.
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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.
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We've abnegated the Kyoto treaty, we've instituted a voluntary program that's obviously not been working, we've taken every effort to excise references to global warming from official documents, to try to undermine international conferences that work on environmental issues, and on and on and on.
Bill McKibben
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.
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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
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.
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The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.
Bill McKibben
The earth is a museum of divine intent.
Bill McKibben
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
Bill McKibben
Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.
Bill McKibben
I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.
Bill McKibben
The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.
Bill McKibben
If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.
Bill McKibben
