Quote

That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century.

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
Life
Fight
Pipeline
People
Century
Montana
Fighting
Quarter
Polluting
Water
Practices
Keystone
Everyone
Aware
Engages
Political
South
Polluted
Well
Standing
Nebraska
Kind
Industry
Dakota

More quotes by Bill McKibben

Image
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
Image
That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly.
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?
Bill McKibben
Image
There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward. And that's a difficult part.
Bill McKibben
Image
The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
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
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
Bill McKibben
Image
TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
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
There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.
Bill McKibben
Image
Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.
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
Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.
Bill McKibben
Image
I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former.
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
[Kids] will grow up into a world that's difficult and wonderful, and they'll make the best of it they can, and hopefully help turn it in the best possible direction.
Bill McKibben
Image
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