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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.

Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
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Palo Alto
California
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Illiterate
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Oxford
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More quotes by Bill McKibben

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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.
Bill McKibben
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Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.
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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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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
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After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
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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.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump's team, I don't see a lot of openings for making real progress.
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.
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Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.
Bill McKibben
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There are so many symptoms of this disease it's hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology - on the way water moves around the planet.
Bill McKibben
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Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Bill McKibben
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We're putting more carbon into the atmosphere than the atmosphere can absorb. And everybody told us when we started, coz we knew nothing when we started - we still don't know very much - but everybody told us 'this is crazy, you don't use a scientific data point, it's a number, people don't respond to numbers'.
Bill McKibben
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Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
Bill McKibben
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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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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.
Bill McKibben
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Very few people on earth ever get to say: 'I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.' If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say
Bill McKibben