Other thing we need to understand is that the financial power of the fossil fuel industry has so far prevented even any minor progress. They have a sweetheart deal unlike any other business on Earth: they're allowed to dispose of their waste for free, to use the atmosphere as an open sewer. And they will do all they can to defend that special privilege.

Bill McKibben

Categorized in : Special Progress Atmosphere

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 done needs

The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.

Bill McKibben

numbers people world

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

global-warming philosophical reality

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.

Bill McKibben

guy advice people

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

Bill McKibben

technology community peace

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

fuel country people

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

change work morning

Look - every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.

Bill McKibben

perfect kids looks

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

euro-crisis cliffs years

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

corporations our-society littles

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

voice spiritual facts

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 McKibben

gay fighting thinking

It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.

Bill McKibben

global-warming ironic firsts

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 important people

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

Bill McKibben

form mind

Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.

Bill McKibben

fossils fuel energy

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

climate-change wake-up warning

What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.

Bill McKibben

capable creatures different

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

chemistry real hands

I think that some of it is electoral - helping candidates that are willing to take dramatic actions, not just to say a few words about how climate change might be a problem.

Bill McKibben

climate might thinking