We're not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it's too late for that. We're trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity Bill McKibben More Quotes by Bill McKibben More Quotes From Bill McKibben Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people. Bill McKibben rich white people If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us. Bill McKibben tunes would-be years My house is covered in solar panels, I'm a great believer in all this - we all should be doing this. Bill McKibben believer should house We've been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone's completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that's too high. It's not a very complicated idea. Bill McKibben oxford numbers ideas To me the analogy [to climate change] is... doctors worry a lot about cholesterol. And if you go to the doctor, and the doctor says "oh, your life would be happier if you ate a different diet and exercised" people pay no attention. Bill McKibben doctors worry people We're putting more carbon into the atmosphere than the atmosphere can absorb. And everybody told us when we started, coz we knew nothing when we started - we still don't know very much - but everybody told us 'this is crazy, you don't use a scientific data point, it's a number, people don't respond to numbers'. Bill McKibben data crazy numbers I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet's history. We do a lot with art and music and things. Bill McKibben art needs thinking I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this. Bill McKibben wrong-person climate thinking In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: 'free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren't solving global warming, QED global warming is not a problem'. It's not a very good syllogism but it's emotionally comforting if you're in that world. Bill McKibben comforting world thinking There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part. Bill McKibben impulse difficult Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known. Bill McKibben winning past moving The consumer culture in general has washed over our civilization. For the last 50 years, if you've had a credit card and some access to money, you don't really need neighbors around you. And as a result, they dwindled. The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don't know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That's an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in - I mean, we're a socially evolved primate. Bill McKibben real mean culture That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century. Bill McKibben fighting water people But the truth is that we could win every other fight that we face and if we lose the climate fight, the other victories will be pyrrhic. I don't think even people who are worried about climate change quite understand the scale and speed with which we're now shifting the planet. Bill McKibben fighting winning thinking There hadn't really been a climate movement, per se. I think everyone spent twenty years thinking that if we just keep pointing out that the world is on the edge of the greatest crisis by far it's ever come to, then our leaders will do something about it. And it turned out that was wrong. They weren't going to do anything about it. Bill McKibben leader years thinking We'd already lost the possibility of stopping global warming entirely. That hasn't been in the cards for a long time. The triumph of Trump probably means that we're not going to be able to stop it at the two-degree mark that the world had been aiming for. That's very bad news, mostly because the planet seems to be more sensitive than we thought to even small increases in temperature. Bill McKibben two long mean Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast. Bill McKibben fuel cities school The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are. Bill McKibben climate-action india ideas We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them. Bill McKibben tipping damage world Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal. Bill McKibben solar-power appeals seems
