Bill McKibben Quotes About Climate Change

Quotes about: Climate Change

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

Bill McKibben

Wake Up, Warning, Climate Change
Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.

Bill McKibben

Climate, Needs, Done
The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

Bill McKibben

Energy, World, Environment

Bill McKibben (2010). “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”, p.2, Macmillan
There's no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.

Bill McKibben

Energy, Climate, Impossible
Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.

Bill McKibben

Names, Weather, Energy

"Hurricane Irene Can Be Tied to Global Warming, Says Bill McKibben" byBill McKibben, www.thedailybeast.com. August 25, 2011.
Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.

Bill McKibben

Russia, Texas, Years
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

Trying, Becoming, Too Late
In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

Bill McKibben

Euro Crisis, Years, Cliffs
When you are in a hole, stop digging!

Bill McKibben

Digging A Hole, Climate Change, Holes

Twitter post from Sep 23, 2016
Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem.

Bill McKibben

Climate, Problem, Climate Change

Source: www.opendemocracy.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
It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet's life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it's very hard to understand why we haven't taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.

Bill McKibben

Crazy, Taken, Our Generation
Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet.

Bill McKibben

Country, Two, Rich Countries

Source: www.opendemocracy.net
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
In the end, climate change is a math problem.

Bill McKibben

Math, Climate, Problem

Source: www.opendemocracy.net
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
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, People, Worry

Source: www.opendemocracy.net
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
In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.

Bill McKibben

Reality, Climate, Climate Change

"Tomgram: Bill McKibben, The Most Important Story of Our Lives". www.tomdispatch.com. May 3, 2012.
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.

Bill McKibben

People, Energy, Climate

Source: www.opendemocracy.net
My goal was to have as many of the primary sources as I could made available for people to look at and understand. Climate change is probably the most important thing that's ever happened, and yet people's understanding of it and its history remains a little fuzzy.

Bill McKibben

People, Goal, Understanding

Source: www.motherjones.com
The irony is that one of the things people want to solve climate change is more market - more price on carbon so that markets have something to chew on when they think about climate change instead of the complete monopoly, the absurdity of allowing these guys to own the sky for free - socialise all of the costs and privatise all of the profits.

Bill McKibben

Thinking, Sky, People

Source: www.opendemocracy.net
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.

Bill McKibben

Years, Data, Together

Source: theotherjournal.com
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

People, Important, Trying

Source: www.opendemocracy.net
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.

Bill McKibben

Thinking, Climate, Might

Source: theotherjournal.com

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Born: December 8, 1960
Occupation: Environmentalist
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