what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors. Bill McKibben More Quotes by Bill McKibben More Quotes From Bill McKibben Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump's team, I don't see a lot of openings for making real progress. Bill McKibben majority-leader team real If you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage? Bill McKibben growing may running My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point. Bill McKibben fuel want wind We're going to need that kind of movement, because the fossil fuel industry is a sprawling adversary - at work everywhere, its tentacles in everybody's politics, invulnerable, I think, to direct frontal assault, but probably more brittle than it guesses if we come at it from all sides. Bill McKibben movement needs thinking [Barack Obama] done some good things, he's done a couple of bad things. He's obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and... lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he's been weak on it. Bill McKibben couple energy done To me, it's more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there's a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought. Bill McKibben important trying people Scientists had said, "If you keep burning coal and gas and oil, you will melt the Arctic." And then the Arctic melted just as they had predicted. Did Shell Oil look at the melt and say, "Huh, maybe we should go into the solar-panel business instead?" No, Shell Oil looked at that and said, "Oh, well, now that it's melted it will be easier to drill for more oil up there." That's enough to make you doubt about the big brain being a good adaptation. Bill McKibben adaptation doubt brain There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S. Bill McKibben new-orleans people past We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change. Bill McKibben political real thinking I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else. Bill McKibben fuel political thinking I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry. Bill McKibben fuel needs thinking I don't think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don't want to be involved in this enterprise. Bill McKibben fuel want thinking From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon. Bill McKibben atmosphere tiny years I'm guessing the most efficient way would be to transfer an awful lot of technology, but also direct aid to deal with climate emergencies already underway. Hillary [Clinton] has already said $100 billion a year would be appropriate. Bill McKibben climate technology years A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens. Bill McKibben carbon currents citizens For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste. Bill McKibben oil summer people The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we'll dawdle. Bill McKibben climate essentials needs We have to get our states to adopt what are called "renewable portfolio standards" pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way. Bill McKibben energy use way The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees." Bill McKibben environmental might people I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth's atmosphere at the moment. Bill McKibben atmosphere justice thinking
