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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.

Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
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Climate Activist
Environmentalist
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Palo Alto
California
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Threat
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Climate
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Crisis
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More quotes by Bill McKibben

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We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
Bill McKibben
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I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
Bill McKibben
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The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think.
Bill McKibben
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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.
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
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People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated (they are a rounding error in the UN's attempts to do national comparisons), and yet, most of whose people are at risk from increased flooding due to rising sea levels.
Bill McKibben
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature it is up to us now to heed them.
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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All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected.
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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... 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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Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
Bill McKibben
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It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.
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.
Bill McKibben
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Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.
Bill McKibben