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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Spend
Petitions
Done
Danger
Mail
Way
Simply
Online
Always
Screens
Never
Greater
Staring
People
Lives
Checks
Used
Sign
Anything
Possibility
Whole

More quotes by 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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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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If you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
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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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Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
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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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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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The irony is that one of the things people want to solve climate change is more market - more price on carbon so that markets have something to chew on when they think about climate change instead of the complete monopoly, the absurdity of allowing these guys to own the sky for free - socialise all of the costs and privatise all of the profits.
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We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.
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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.
Bill McKibben
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If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.
Bill McKibben
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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
Bill McKibben
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
Bill McKibben
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The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.
Bill McKibben
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One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
Bill McKibben
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At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.
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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I can't tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they're stepping up to be part of the solution.
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If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.
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