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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
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Climate Activist
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Palo Alto
California
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Melting
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Nuns
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More quotes by 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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The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.
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I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
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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.
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On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.
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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!
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You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
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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.
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The polling data shows not an unbelievable level of concern [on climate issue] but a general awareness of this problem. And now I think it's up to all sorts of people who really care about these things to continue on this new ground to try and make this the central political issue it needs to be.
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Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.
Bill McKibben
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Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Bill McKibben
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I don't spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don't think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they're based in ideology. And I don't think there's anything you can do.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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We'd won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren't going to win.
Bill McKibben
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There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.
Bill McKibben
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To me the analogy [to climate change] is... doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised people pay no attention.
Bill McKibben
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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
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Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.
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