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Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.

Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
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Sometimes
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Offence
Defence
Anyway
Tired
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More quotes by 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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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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everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between good weather and bad weather is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.
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The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.
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The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.
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My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.
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We've abnegated the Kyoto treaty, we've instituted a voluntary program that's obviously not been working, we've taken every effort to excise references to global warming from official documents, to try to undermine international conferences that work on environmental issues, and on and on and on.
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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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In the States we've had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.
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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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We'll never get there if we let the climate crisis bloom unchecked, so for the moment the key is to organize, organize, organize!
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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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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.
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To me, it's more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there's a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought.
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We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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The earth is a museum of divine intent.
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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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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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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
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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