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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

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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Need
Direct
Tentacles
Needs
Industry
Adversary
Going
Movement
Fossil
Work
Probably
Fossils
Invulnerable
Kind
Sides
Adversaries
Frontal
Think
Everybody
Assault
Sprawling
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Politics
Fuel
Guesses
Come
Everywhere
Brittle

More quotes by Bill McKibben

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From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.
Bill McKibben
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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
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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.
Bill McKibben
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In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it's more or less been over since 1995.
Bill McKibben
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I can't tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they're stepping up to be part of the solution.
Bill McKibben
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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!
Bill McKibben
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If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.
Bill McKibben
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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
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I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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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.
Bill McKibben
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Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
Bill McKibben
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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
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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
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We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.
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 we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
Bill McKibben
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Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.
Bill McKibben
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It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.
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