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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

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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Think
Basic
Destructiveness
Thinking
Physical
Disruption
Creation
Blasphemy
Process
Thorough
Felt
Suicidal
Also
Profoundly
Self
Processes
Going
Engaged

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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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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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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.
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The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
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I did very much like [Barack] Obama's attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we'll try to push it forward.
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[Kids] will grow up into a world that's difficult and wonderful, and they'll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
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We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.
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I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.
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One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
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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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We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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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.
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When you are in a hole, stop digging!
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We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.
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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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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.
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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.
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