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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Connected
Square
Smart
Squares
Internet
Censorship
Getting
Park
People
Signs
Incipient
Recent
Shutdown
Parks
Uprising
Protest
Activism

More quotes by Bill McKibben

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we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
Bill McKibben
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Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.
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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If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.
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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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.
Bill McKibben
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Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.
Bill McKibben
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Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump's team, I don't see a lot of openings for making real progress.
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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I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
Bill McKibben
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TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.
Bill McKibben
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Where people aren't as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it's far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they're much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They're ready to go.
Bill McKibben
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Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.
Bill McKibben
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Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.
Bill McKibben
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We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.
Bill McKibben
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We have to get our states to adopt what are called renewable portfolio standards pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
Bill McKibben
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That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly.
Bill McKibben
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Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.
Bill McKibben
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Look - every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
Bill McKibben
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In fact, corporations are the infants of our society - they know very little except how to grow (though they're very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It's about time we took it up again.
Bill McKibben