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The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.

Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
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Climate Activist
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More quotes by 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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... 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?
Bill McKibben
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The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are.
Bill McKibben
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I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
Bill McKibben
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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.
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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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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Science, of course, replaced God as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
Bill McKibben
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I'm far less a leader than a writer.
Bill McKibben
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I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
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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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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There's always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there's the greater possibility we'll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.
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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TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.
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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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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Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.
Bill McKibben