Quote

I don't know how to make people who absolutely have to be obsessed with paying a week's energy bills... obsessed with climate change... It's very hard.

Bill McKibben

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
People
Bills
Climate
Absolutely
Week
Energy
Change
Hard
Paying
Make
Obsessed

More quotes by Bill McKibben

Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.
Bill McKibben
Image
... the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've seen a thousand images of them - seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild?
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
We have to get our states to adopt what are called renewable portfolio standards pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
I don't think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don't want to be involved in this enterprise.
Bill McKibben
Image
Here, there's more of a movement, it doesn't mean we're winning any more, but we're at least fighting.
Bill McKibben
Image
In fact, corporations are the infants of our society - they know very little except how to grow (though they're very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It's about time we took it up again.
Bill McKibben