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 McKibbenIf [a student's] collegeโs endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they wonโt have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
Bill McKibbenThat'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 McKibbenI think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth's atmosphere at the moment.
Bill McKibbenOne of my favorite places is the Maldives, an all-Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean with a culture that stretches back 5,000 years. But since the highest point in the archipelago is a meter or two above sea level, even the next hundred are not guaranteed. They've committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth by 2020, building windmills as fast as they can.
Bill McKibbenI did very much like [Barack] Obama's attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we'll try to push it forward.
Bill McKibben... the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've seen a thousand images of them - seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild?
Bill McKibben