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

Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem.

Bill McKibben

hard-work country thinking

The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.

Bill McKibben

green house home

We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.

Bill McKibben

differences people past

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.

Bill McKibben

design real book

I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.

Bill McKibben

population climate problem

we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.

Bill McKibben

confusion loneliness use

I don't spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don't think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they're based in ideology. And I don't think there's anything you can do.

Bill McKibben

denial climate thinking

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

Bill McKibben

climate-change holes digging-a-hole

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.

Bill McKibben

powerful attitude thinking

Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.

Bill McKibben

spare-time levels home

I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.

Bill McKibben

stress running thinking

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?

Bill McKibben

offering order television

The earth is a museum of divine intent.

Bill McKibben

divine earth museums

When 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

giving-up talking country

[The Maldives] they've become deeply politically engaged - just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

Bill McKibben

coral-reefs dying president

Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially.

Bill McKibben

seductive oil average

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

Bill McKibben

fuel balance healthy

The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.

Bill McKibben

email climate writing

One 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 McKibben

ocean sea years

Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.

Bill McKibben

abundance problem use