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 More Quotes by Bill McKibben More Quotes From Bill McKibben The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves. Bill McKibben hurricanes depth example 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. Bill McKibben errors country lying It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt. Bill McKibben happenings ice people It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century. Bill McKibben cutting exercise order 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. Bill McKibben problem mistake world We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Bill McKibben ice summer civilization If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing. Bill McKibben home country people Stop thinking about global warming as a future threat and understand it instead as a present emergency, one that requires a far stronger policy response than we'd imagined. Bill McKibben emergencies stronger thinking Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming. Bill McKibben global-warming environmental wish We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts. Bill McKibben events add people 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. Bill McKibben degrees twenties years Speaking for me, I think the odds of bankrupting Exxon are pretty small, but I think the odds of politically bankrupting them are higher. I think if we can use this as a vehicle to get out the analysis that these guys have 3-5 times as much carbon in the ground as the most conservative government thinks would be safe to burn, then that politically stigmatises them, makes them into the rogue industry that they are. Bill McKibben government odds thinking We'd like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us. Bill McKibben fossils fuel feet Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence. Bill McKibben tired play sometimes We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean. Bill McKibben coal pipeline ocean The flaw is the business plan - digging up and burning way more carbon than physics says we can deal with. So, I suppose it's some kind of mid-point between writing them nice letters asking them to stop and figuring out a way to take down the entire system- which I don't have any idea how to do. Bill McKibben nice writing ideas If Apple is enslaving Chinese to make its iPhones, you don't need to eat the i-Phone, you need to make sure that Apple is paying a living wage to someone, and then it adds a dollar to the cost of iphones, and everybody's cool. Bill McKibben apples iphone phones I don't know how to make people who absolutely have to be obsessed with paying a week's energy bills... obsessed with climate change... It's very hard. Bill McKibben climate energy people If one wanted to stigmaitise, that's how one would do it - lots and lots of people saying "we're severing our ties". Bill McKibben ties wanted people When we work all over the planet, it's mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that's mostly what the world [environmentalism] is. Bill McKibben black people world
