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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
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Keystones
Ocean
Keystone
Spend
Pipeline
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Pacific
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If the Holy Spirit is capable of the heavy lifting required to get Pat Robertson to change his mind, then that strikes me as a very good sign.
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A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
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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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A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
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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.
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I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.
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In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.
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If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.
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Science, of course, replaced God as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
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For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste.
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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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If one wanted to stigmaitise, that's how one would do it - lots and lots of people saying we're severing our ties.
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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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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 real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain.
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