Latest Bill McKibben Quotes from Interviews

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• 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

  Doubt, Brain, Adaptation

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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.

  Bill McKibben

  Mean, Fighting, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Difficult, Impulse

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Moving, Winning, Past

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think.

  Bill McKibben

  Fighting, Gay, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I've spent my life living in rural America, some of it in blue state Vermont, some of it in red state upstate New York. They're quite alike in many ways. And quite wonderful. It's important that even in an urbanized and suburbanized country, we continue to take rural America seriously. And the thing that makes Vermont in particular so special, and I hope this book captures some of it, is the basic underlying civility of its political life. That's rooted in the town meeting. Each of the towns in Vermont governs itself.

  Bill McKibben

  Country, Book, Political

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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, People, Water

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.

  Bill McKibben

  Morning, Jobs, Optimistic

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bill McKibben

  Leader, Scare, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

• We're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.

  Bill McKibben

  Past, Differences, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Thinking, Years, Leader

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Bill McKibben

  Summer, Ice, Sea

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Mean, Two, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  School, Cities, Fuel

  "Donald Trump Is a Disaster for the Earth on Every Single Level". Interview with Julia Lurie, www.motherjones.com. November 11, 2016.

• 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, Ideas, India

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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, World, Damage

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.

  Bill McKibben

  Appeals, Solar Power, Seems

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• There are many places where we need to fight important battles to make sure that customers have access to solar.

  Bill McKibben

  Fighting, Important, Battle

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Real, Team, Majority Leader

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Running, Growing, May

  "Donald Trump Is a Disaster for the Earth on Every Single Level". Interview with Julia Lurie, www.motherjones.com. November 11, 2016.

• 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

  Wind, Fuel, Want

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• 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

  Thinking, Needs, Movement

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net

• 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.

  Bill McKibben

  People, Guy, Advice

  Source: www.opendemocracy.net