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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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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
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More quotes by Bill McKibben

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I'm far less a leader than a writer.
Bill McKibben
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community.
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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.
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Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast.
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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.
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A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
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Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
Bill McKibben
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In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.
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There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
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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
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The habits of the West in terms of consumption.
Bill McKibben
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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
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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.
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I don't spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don't think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they're based in ideology. And I don't think there's anything you can do.
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The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.
Bill McKibben
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I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.
Bill McKibben
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Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
Bill McKibben