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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.

Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Habit
Term
Consumption
Habits
West
Terms

More quotes by 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!
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The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.
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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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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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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.
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I guess the underlying principle might be, don't make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
Bill McKibben
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I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.
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When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one's figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that's good.
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I'm guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.
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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.
Bill McKibben
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I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
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What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
Bill McKibben
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Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we're doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.
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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.
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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.
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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