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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Projects
Keystones
Ocean
Keystone
Spend
Pipeline
Playing
Port
Huge
Pacific
Another
Defence
Things
Coal
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Ports

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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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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 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.
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It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet's life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it's very hard to understand why we haven't taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.
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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.
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The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are.
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[Barack Obama] done some good things, he's done a couple of bad things. He's obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and... lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he's been weak on it.
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I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former.
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The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
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Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.
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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.
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Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.
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.
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I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.
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Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
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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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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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Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.
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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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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.
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