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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Creature
Decide
Creatures
Capable
Makes
Different
Something

More quotes by Bill McKibben

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If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it's also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!
Bill McKibben
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I think fracking for gas will reduce the incentive to turn to renewables, and I think it will do a lot of other damage across the countryside.
Bill McKibben
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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
Bill McKibben
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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
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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These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
Bill McKibben
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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
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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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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
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We'll never get there if we let the climate crisis bloom unchecked, so for the moment the key is to organize, organize, organize!
Bill McKibben
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In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it's more or less been over since 1995.
Bill McKibben
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If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.
Bill McKibben
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
Bill McKibben
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I'm far less a leader than a writer.
Bill McKibben
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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
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We're going to need that kind of movement, because the fossil fuel industry is a sprawling adversary - at work everywhere, its tentacles in everybody's politics, invulnerable, I think, to direct frontal assault, but probably more brittle than it guesses if we come at it from all sides.
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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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.
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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I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
Bill McKibben