Bill McKibben
Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.Collection: Real
The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.Collection: Ideas
I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.Collection: Climate
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.Collection: Real
The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.Collection: Home
When you are in a hole, stop digging!Collection: 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.Collection: Powerful
Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Country
I think that some of it is electoral - helping candidates that are willing to take dramatic actions, not just to say a few words about how climate change might be a problem.Collection: Thinking
I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.Collection: Thinking
I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.Collection: 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.Collection: Thinking
From some tiny portion of the wealth the west accumulated in a hundred years of filling the atmosphere with carbon.Collection: Years
Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we're doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme.Collection: Years
People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated (they are a rounding error in the UN's attempts to do national comparisons), and yet, most of whose people are at risk from increased flooding due to rising sea levels.Collection: Country
Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world's poor people depend.Collection: People
We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.Collection: People
Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming.Collection: Wish
So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn't seem like an enormous amount but it's unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.Collection: Years
Probably more than anything else, the place that we really see the effects of the power of even the relatively mild temperature increases so far is in the melting of everything frozen on the planet.Collection: Melting
It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.Collection: Ice
On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.Collection: Ocean
We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.Collection: Given
All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.Collection: Years
There is basically no one not on the payroll of Exxon Mobil or coal companies who any longer contend that this is not something to worry about.Collection: Worry
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.Collection: Country
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Technology
A price on carbon sufficient to keep 80% of current reserves underground, rebated directly to citizens.Collection: Citizens
Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Ocean
[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.Collection: Dying
"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Talking
Other thing we need to understand is that the financial power of the fossil fuel industry has so far prevented even any minor progress. They have a sweetheart deal unlike any other business on Earth: they're allowed to dispose of their waste for free, to use the atmosphere as an open sewer. And they will do all they can to defend that special privilege.Collection: Atmosphere
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.Collection: Yield
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.Collection: Climate
I think communities of faith are extremely important in this question. I think that all faith communities share a common and unusual distinction in our time of being the only institutions left that can posit some goal other than accumulation for human existence. I think that's enormously important because it is that drive for consumption more than anything else that fuels the environmental devastation around us.Collection: Thinking
The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Powerful
Speaking for me, I think the odds of bankrupting Exxon are pretty small, but I think the odds of politically bankrupting them are higher. I think if we can use this as a vehicle to get out the analysis that these guys have 3-5 times as much carbon in the ground as the most conservative government thinks would be safe to burn, then that politically stigmatises them, makes them into the rogue industry that they are.Collection: Thinking
There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.Collection: Christmas
Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.Collection: Atmosphere
What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.Collection: Different
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 calamityCollection: Trying
We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.Collection: Life