Bill McKibben
The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?Collection: Time
Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.Collection: Commitment
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.Collection: Thinking
Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.Collection: Appeals
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.Collection: Thinking
If the Holy Spirit is capable of the heavy lifting required to get Pat Robertson to change his mind, then that strikes me as a very good sign.Collection: Mind
[Political actions] has to happen on the local and state level; we have to convince our cities to join the growing number of more than 200 American cities who have signed on to the mayor's climate campaign.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Moving
Policies that engage us again in the international fight for real climate protection.Collection: Real
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.Collection: Challenges
Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.Collection: Ocean
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.Collection: Colonialism
I've got no advice. You guys know where you are and what will work. Just know that there are people all over the place working on this and that there's a great deal of solidarity around the world and we should try to build this big, sprawling movement that looks like the kind of energy system that we want - building lots of solar panels on lots of rooftops that are all interconnected.Collection: People
I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Climate Action
I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.Collection: Loss
We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.Collection: Leader
Look - every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: People
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."Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Tipping
Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.Collection: Money
Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.Collection: Use
The religious environmental movement is potentially key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced, and it has never been captured with more breadth and force than in RENEWAL. I hope this movie is screened in church basements and synagogue social halls across the country, and that it moves many more people of faith off the fence and into action.Collection: Country
In the end, climate change is a math problem.Collection: Math
The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases doubles from pre-Industrial Revolution concentrations, the global average temperature will increase, and that the increase will be 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius or 3 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit... In Dallas, for instance, a doubled level of carbon dioxide and other gases like methane, would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from 19 to 78 each year.Collection: Average
When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one's figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that's good.Collection: Sun
In the States, the movement's actually gotten much much much stronger. There really was no climate movement so to speak before that - I think because everybody assumed that reasonable heads would prevail and do the right thing - and why would you need to have a huge movement in order to cause our leaders to deal with the most serious problem that they face. In a rational world you wouldn't. They would deal with it.Collection: Thinking
TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.Collection: Real
The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.Collection: Future
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.Collection: Business
Do I think that people should in the best of all possible worlds have to go to jail for wanting the US government to pay attention to the warnings of scientists about climate change? Not really. I mean, in a rational world, if all the scientists said, "The worst thing that ever happened is about to happen and here's what you should do to stop it," you would expect any rational system to say, "Oh, sure, OK, let's do something about it." But that's not the world we live in. In the world we live in, you do need people willing to stand up, fight, march and sometimes go to jail.Collection: Mean
At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.Collection: Country
In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We've seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .Collection: Country
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planetCollection: Healthy
Often when I'm on TV, they'll ask what are the three most important things for people to do. I know they want me to say that people should change their light bulbs. I say the number one thing is to organize politically; number two, do some political organizing; number three, get together with your neighbors and organize; and then if you have energy left over from all of that, change the light bulb.Collection: Light
I'm far less a leader than a writer.Collection: Leader
We've lost half the summer sea ice in the Arctic. We've wiped out an enormous percentage of the world's coral reefs. We see huge changes in the planet's hydrology already, the cycles of drought and flood both amped up because warm air holds more water vapor than cold. These things are happening with a one-degree increase and going to two degrees won't be twice as bad, the increase in damage won't be linear, it most certainly will be exponential. So it was precisely the wrong moment to elect Trump.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Country
Where people aren't as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it's far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they're much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They're ready to go.Collection: Europe
All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community.Collection: Real
That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly.Collection: Years
Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.Collection: Names
After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.Collection: Animal
If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it's also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!Collection: Thinking