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 McKibbenIf you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
Bill McKibbenWhen you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision.
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 McKibbenProbably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.
Bill McKibbenThere's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.
Bill McKibben