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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Atmosphere
Tiny
West
Hundred
Accumulated
Wealth
Portion
Years
Portions
Filling
Carbon

More quotes by Bill McKibben

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The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.
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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.
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Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
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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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If the Holy Spirit is capable of the heavy lifting required to get Pat Robertson to change his mind, then that strikes me as a very good sign.
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There are so many symptoms of this disease it's hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology - on the way water moves around the planet.
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We've been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone's completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that's too high. It's not a very complicated idea.
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I don't know how to make people who absolutely have to be obsessed with paying a week's energy bills... obsessed with climate change... It's very hard.
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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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One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
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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.
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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.
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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
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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.
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Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
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We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.
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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.
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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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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That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century.
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