Bill McKibben Quotes

I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

I'm guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate.

Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.

We'd already lost the possibility of stopping global warming entirely. That hasn't been in the cards for a long time. The triumph of Trump probably means that we're not going to be able to stop it at the two-degree mark that the world had been aiming for. That's very bad news, mostly because the planet seems to be more sensitive than we thought to even small increases in temperature.

If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world?

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.

The habits of the West in terms of consumption.

The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

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.

After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.

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.

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.

We just see a sort of cascading amount of data of the damage that is being done by those increased temperatures.

I've got no advice. You guys know where you are and what will work. Just know that there are people all over the place working on this and that there's a great deal of solidarity around the world and we should try to build this big, sprawling movement that looks like the kind of energy system that we want - building lots of solar panels on lots of rooftops that are all interconnected.

When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one's figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that's good.

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

We had other currencies that we could find work in - the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.

In the end, climate change is a math problem.

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.

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.

A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.

The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.

It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we're the largest source of the problem: 4% of us who are in the U.S. produce 25% of the world's carbon dioxide.

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.

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.

We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.

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

Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.

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.

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.

Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.

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.

Do I think that people should in the best of all possible worlds have to go to jail for wanting the US government to pay attention to the warnings of scientists about climate change? Not really. I mean, in a rational world, if all the scientists said, "The worst thing that ever happened is about to happen and here's what you should do to stop it," you would expect any rational system to say, "Oh, sure, OK, let's do something about it." But that's not the world we live in. In the world we live in, you do need people willing to stand up, fight, march and sometimes go to jail.

I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet's history. We do a lot with art and music and things.

Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.

The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are.

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

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

I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There's real hunger out there.

Where people aren't as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it's far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they're much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They're ready to go.

Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.

People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated (they are a rounding error in the UN's attempts to do national comparisons), and yet, most of whose people are at risk from increased flooding due to rising sea levels.

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!

There's always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there's the greater possibility we'll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.

The polling data shows not an unbelievable level of concern [on climate issue] but a general awareness of this problem. And now I think it's up to all sorts of people who really care about these things to continue on this new ground to try and make this the central political issue it needs to be.

So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn't seem like an enormous amount but it's unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.