These studies are part of the emerging scientific understanding that we're in even hotter water than we'd thought, we're a long ways down the path to disastrous global warming, and the policy response -- especially in the United States -- has been pathetically underwhelming.

Bill McKibben

Categorized in : World

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

Bill McKibben

fossils fuel math

If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.

Bill McKibben

waiting feet years

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.

Bill McKibben

future running long

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

Bill McKibben

environment energy world

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.

Bill McKibben

distance taken real

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.

Bill McKibben

imagine-that imagine life

All the things that we've done as a species have had a limited scope. We're talking about melting the ice caps, raising the level of the seas dramatically, changing the distribution of every other species on Earth, perhaps wiping out one-third or half of them. The changes at work are geologic in scale. The level of change required to deal with it is enormous, too. It will require change in every country. It will require a degree of global cooperation that we haven't seen before.

Bill McKibben

ice talking country

There's no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.

Bill McKibben

climate energy impossible

Policies that engage us again in the international fight for real climate protection.

Bill McKibben

climate fighting real

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.

Bill McKibben

ocean sky night

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.

Bill McKibben

divergent yield law

Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.

Bill McKibben

carbon atmosphere company

We have to transition to new technologies, making it more expensive to continue with the old and polluting technologies and cheaper to go to the clean ones.

Bill McKibben

clean transition technology

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.

Bill McKibben

powerful names thinking

In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.

Bill McKibben

climate-change climate reality

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.

Bill McKibben

holiday christmas reflection

The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.

Bill McKibben

years moving needs

My goal was to have as many of the primary sources as I could made available for people to look at and understand. Climate change is probably the most important thing that's ever happened, and yet people's understanding of it and its history remains a little fuzzy.

Bill McKibben

understanding goal people

A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.

Bill McKibben

ocean air summer

We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.

Bill McKibben

pipeline degrees talking