Bill McKibben Quotes
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Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.
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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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We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.
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Pity the poor senator or representative trying to stay alive in the political jungle. At every turn, there's a danger: a constituent who actually wants something done. Or worse, a campaign donor who might be offended by that something.
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If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.
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We can't bankrupt Exxon. But we can politically and morally bankrupt them.
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When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
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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.
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It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided.
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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.
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The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse-the analogy is accurate. But it's more than that. We have built a greenhouse, 'a human creation' where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
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The popular notion is that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels, but I find that's not true; most people would be happy to power their lives with anything else.
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The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When I'm home, I'm a pretty green fellow.
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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.
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Our criteria is that it's okay to invest in companies so long as they stop lobbying in Washington, stop exploring for new hydrocarbons, and sit down with every one else to plan to keep 80 percent of the reserves in the ground.
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If it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage.
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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.
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In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day.
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If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate.
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The logic of divestment couldn't be simpler: if it's wrong to wreck the climate, it's wrong to profit from that wreckage.