Bill McKibben famous quotes

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
-- Bill McKibben

#Math #Fuel #Fossils

I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
-- Bill McKibben

#Climate #Population #Problem

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
-- Bill McKibben

#Healthy #Balance #Fuel

Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.
-- Bill McKibben

#Real #Issues #Climate

Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem.
-- Bill McKibben

#Country #Hard Work #Thinking

Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.
-- Bill McKibben

#Home #Levels #Spare Time

what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.
-- Bill McKibben

#Mind #Form

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

#Our Society #Limits #Facts

You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.
-- Bill McKibben

#Morning #Thinking #August

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
-- Bill McKibben

#Christmas #Reflection #Desire

If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.
-- Bill McKibben

#Years #Feet #Waiting

Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
-- Bill McKibben

#Running #Advent #Footsteps

I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.
-- Bill McKibben

#Air #Years #Long

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
-- Bill McKibben

#Tolerance #Laziness #Moral

Very few people on earth ever get to say: 'I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.' If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say
-- Bill McKibben

#Fighting #People #Important

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
-- Bill McKibben

#Half #Tvs #Easy

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

#Wake Up #Warning #Climate Change

The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
-- Bill McKibben

#Peace #Technology #Community

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.
-- Bill McKibben

#Challenges #Important #Tendencies

If [a student's] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
-- Bill McKibben

#College #Degrees #Guarantees

Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.
-- Bill McKibben

#Climate #Needs #Done

In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
-- Bill McKibben

#Reality #Climate #Climate Change

We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
-- Bill McKibben

#Powerful #Attitude #Thinking

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
-- Bill McKibben

#Style #Desire #Ability

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.
-- Bill McKibben

#Life #Imagine #Imagine That

If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.
-- Bill McKibben

#Wrecks #Wreckage #Profit

We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
-- Bill McKibben

#Sweet #Garden #Biodiversity

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

#Thinking #Growth #Environmental

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.
-- Bill McKibben

#Spiritual #Voice #Facts

We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.
-- Bill McKibben

#Art #Taken #Sadness

The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
-- Bill McKibben

#Home #House #Green

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
-- Bill McKibben

#Thinking #Global Warming #Argument

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

#Taken #Men #Years

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

#Years #Care #Cliffs

There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
-- Bill McKibben

#Oil #Wind #Fossils

These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us - it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to this problem. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet. We've never figured out, though God knows we've tried, a more effective way to destroy their lives.
-- Bill McKibben

#Country #People #Fuel

The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases doubles from pre-Industrial Revolution concentrations, the global average temperature will increase, and that the increase will be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit... In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year.
-- Bill McKibben

#Average #Years #Numbers

At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.
-- Bill McKibben

#Country #Hate #Sea

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us....God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.
-- Bill McKibben

#Jobs #Book #Rain

The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.
-- Bill McKibben

#Future #Long #Desire

"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
-- Bill McKibben

#Future #Two #People

What we're talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It's going to take us a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put ourselves.
-- Bill McKibben

#Talking #Long #Comfort

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.
-- Bill McKibben

#Powerful #Thinking #Names

TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.
-- Bill McKibben

#Real #Thinking #Might

We're not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it's too late for that. We're trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity
-- Bill McKibben

#Trying #Too Late #Becoming

Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.
-- Bill McKibben

#Philosophical #Reality #Global Warming

Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.
-- Bill McKibben

#Weather #Russia #Texas

Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.
-- Bill McKibben

#Names #Energy #Global Warming

There's no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
-- Bill McKibben

#Energy #Climate #Impossible

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.
-- Bill McKibben

#Energy #World #Environment

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.
-- Bill McKibben

#People #Community #Needs

Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.
-- Bill McKibben

#Commitment #Justice #Overcoming

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?
-- Bill McKibben

#Time #August #Shopping

We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.
-- Bill McKibben

#Christmas #Ties #Giving

we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
-- Bill McKibben

#Loneliness #Confusion #Use

what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.
-- Bill McKibben

#Zoos #Animal #Exotic

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

#Real #Hands #Global Warming

According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually
-- Bill McKibben

#Growth #Balance #Research

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.
-- Bill McKibben

#Real #Book #Design

The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
-- Bill McKibben

#Writing #Climate #Email

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

#Crazy #Taken #Issues

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place
-- Bill McKibben

#Running #Future #Long

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information,
-- Bill McKibben

#Believe #Ignorance #Opposites

A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.
-- Bill McKibben

#Summer #Ocean #Ice

The religious environmental movement is potentially key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced, and it has never been captured with more breadth and force than in RENEWAL. I hope this movie is screened in church basements and synagogue social halls across the country, and that it moves many more people of faith off the fence and into action.
-- Bill McKibben

#Country #Religious #Moving

When you are in a hole, stop digging!
-- Bill McKibben

#Digging #Holes

TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.
-- Bill McKibben

#Real #Persistence #Anchors

We've built a new Earth. It's not as nice as the old one; it's the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever.
-- Bill McKibben

#Mistake #Nice #Forever

everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.
-- Bill McKibben

#Rain #Weather #Needs

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

#Fighting #Technology #Being Free

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.
-- Bill McKibben

#Ocean #Night #Sky

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
-- Bill McKibben

#Yield #Law #Divergent

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free
-- Bill McKibben

#Business #Fossils #Fuel