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

Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Desire
Abilities
Life
Lifestyle
Desires
Outside
Beyond
Style
Simplification
Probably
Voluntary
Ability
Styles

More quotes by Bill McKibben

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Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
Bill McKibben
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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.
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For the first time in 150 years, the USDA reported there were more farms in America, not fewer. That has to make you happy.
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That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly.
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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
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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
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what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.
Bill McKibben
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Here, there's more of a movement, it doesn't mean we're winning any more, but we're at least fighting.
Bill McKibben
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All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.
Bill McKibben
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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
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In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.
Bill McKibben
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Look - every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
Bill McKibben
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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
Bill McKibben
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Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump's team, I don't see a lot of openings for making real progress.
Bill McKibben
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I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet's history. We do a lot with art and music and things.
Bill McKibben
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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
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What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
Bill McKibben
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Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.
Bill McKibben