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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
Himalayan
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Monk
Nuns
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More quotes by Bill McKibben

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The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we'll dawdle.
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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.
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Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we're doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.
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... the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've seen a thousand images of them - seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild?
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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.
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One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
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The irony is that one of the things people want to solve climate change is more market - more price on carbon so that markets have something to chew on when they think about climate change instead of the complete monopoly, the absurdity of allowing these guys to own the sky for free - socialise all of the costs and privatise all of the profits.
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The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
Bill McKibben
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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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Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.
Bill McKibben
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We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.
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Very few people on earth ever get to say: 'I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.' If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say
Bill McKibben
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If one wanted to stigmaitise, that's how one would do it - lots and lots of people saying we're severing our ties.
Bill McKibben
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After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
Bill McKibben