Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Bill McKibben
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
People
Understand
Percentage
Thought
Percentages
Change
Stamps
Problem
Scientific
Take
Active
Important
Climate
Trying
Lasts
Embers
Really
Last
Stamp
More quotes by Bill McKibben
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
I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
Bill McKibben
What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
Bill McKibben
Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.
Bill McKibben
To me the analogy [to climate change] is... doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised people pay no attention.
Bill McKibben
These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
Bill McKibben
We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.
Bill McKibben
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
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
what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.
Bill McKibben
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
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
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.
Bill McKibben
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
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.
Bill McKibben
If you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
Bill McKibben
Without a movement pressing for change, there's little hope. We've got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.
Bill McKibben
We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.
Bill McKibben
The earth is a museum of divine intent.
Bill McKibben
If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it's also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!
Bill McKibben