Bill Mckibben Quotes

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield. ~ Bill McKibben

A writer doesn't owe a reader hope - the only obligation is honesty... ~ Bill McKibben

Last year, the USDA said for the first time in 150 years that there were more farms in America instead of fewer. I think that's the single most hopeful statistic I know. ~ Bill McKibben

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires. ~ Bill McKibben

The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising. ~ 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? ~ Bill McKibben

We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor
by giving each other motorized tie racks. ~ Bill McKibben

These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us - it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to this problem. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet. We've never figured out, though God knows we've tried, a more effective way to destroy their lives. ~ Bill McKibben

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

The snow was coming down so hard. It looked like the flakes were hurrying to get out of the sky so the next ones would have room to fall. ~ Bill McKibben

The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done. ~ Bill McKibben

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there. ~ Bill McKibben

The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain. ~ Bill McKibben

In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day. ~ Bill McKibben

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. ~ Bill McKibben

There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being. ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness. ~ Bill McKibben

Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies. ~ Bill McKibben

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us ... God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions. ~ Bill McKibben

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago. ~ Bill McKibben

Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them. ~ Bill McKibben

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet. ~ Bill McKibben

Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when
you're running yourself. ~ Bill McKibben

If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world? ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

"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. ~ Bill McKibben

What you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors. ~ Bill McKibben

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to. ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

Increasingly we live in a world filled with the equivalents of deadly garage-door openers, unnecessary items that offer us mild and insipid comfort at the price of a dangerous and uncomfortable planet, and at the price of any real relationship to the physical world. if you live in a suburban home and commute to a parking garage somewhere, that ten seconds of opening the garage door(manually) might be nearly the only rain you ever feel. ~ Bill McKibben

We can't bankrupt Exxon. But we can politically and morally bankrupt them. ~ Bill McKibben

Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially. ~ Bill McKibben

Only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. ~ Bill McKibben

Without a movement pressing for change, there's little hope. We've got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large. ~ Bill McKibben

It ensured that I'd never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites. ~ Bill McKibben

Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality. ~ Bill McKibben

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. ~ Bill McKibben

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

The earth is a museum of divine intent. ~ Bill McKibben

In fact, corporations are the infants of our society - they know very little except how to grow (though they're very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It's about time we took it up again. ~ Bill McKibben

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

We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden. ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing. ~ Bill McKibben

The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When I'm home, I'm a pretty green fellow. ~ 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. ~ Bill McKibben

Very few people on earth ever get to say: "I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing." If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say. ~ Bill McKibben

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour. ~ Bill McKibben

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s) ~ Bill McKibben

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. ~ Bill McKibben

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that. ~ Bill McKibben

We all need to be reminded that democracy isn't just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future. ~ Bill McKibben

Climate change is not a hot topic. As author Bill McKibben points out in a post on TomDispatch.com, in 2011, "ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming." He documents that over the last three years, a mere ninety-eight minutes of prime-time television news was devoted to covering this global challenge. In fact, in 2011, the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of time on climate change - all of it given over to Republican politicians focused on denying it. ~ Mary Pipher

The television culture celebrates incompetence. ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

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

Everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun. ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing. ~ Bill McKibben

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us. ~ Bill McKibben

There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources. ~ Bill McKibben

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! ~ Bill McKibben

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. ~ Bill McKibben

A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods. ~ Bill McKibben

When you are in a hole, stop digging! ~ Bill McKibben

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything. ~ Bill McKibben

The constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've seen a thousand images of them - seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild? ~ Bill McKibben

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

The popular notion is that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels, but I find that's not true; most people would be happy to power their lives with anything else. ~ Bill McKibben

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

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions. ~ Bill McKibben

What we're talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It's going to take us a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put ourselves. ~ Bill McKibben

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free ~ Bill McKibben

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. ~ Bill McKibben

There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore. ~ Bill Maher

You know what's the rage this year? ...Hats. ~ Bill Watterson

Commit yourself to a passion that moves you. ~ Bill Strickland

Think of business as a good game. Lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money. ~ Bill Gates

One of the reasons that I'm a lurker on Twitter is that every time I tweet an idea, I feel like I'm delivering something to the competition that I ought to be giving to a reporter here. ~ Bill Keller

It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid. ~ Bill Bryson

In order to get around the $500 cap, it's common knowledge that either potential candidates or public officials simply create these organizations, accumulate large sums of money which are then used in support of their campaign or to contribute to their campaign. They were trying to close that loophole. ~ Bill Vaughan

Things were about as normal as a Luddite working for Bill Gates.' – Sundown ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. ~ Bill Watterson

This Ted Cruz guy, I mean, he incurred the wrath, really, of his own party. They don't like him. Democrats hate him. Independents hate him. Republicans hate him. Even Miley Cyrus, he's the one guy she refuses to lick. ~ Bill Maher

I am not topper in my university but all toppers are working in my microsoft company. ~ Bill Gates

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.) ~ Bill Bryson

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out. ~ Bill Murray

Realize that from the start, every activity that comprises the journey has value and the ability to teach you something. ~ Bill Toomey

The saints suffered many hardships as well, and many were psychologically challenged, but they had something to fall back on - Jesus Christ. He is there for others as well, but no one is obliged to accept his hand. For intellectuals, the thought of doing so is not just bizarre, it is scary: to reach out to God would be to acknowledge their subordinate status, and that is not something their ego will allow. Surrendering to God is not in their cards. So they suffer. ~ Bill Donohue

What I do best is share my enthusiasm. ~ Bill Gates

We have been through a period where we see power leaching away from Washington. Who is more important in the world today: Bill Clinton or Bill Gates? I don't know. ~ Peter Jennings

It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw. ~ Bill Watterson

I do not think that winning is the most important thing. I think winning is the only thing. ~ Bill Veeck

He's dangerous because when God talks to him Bob will do whatever God asks him to do at great cost, even if no one agrees, if it's contrary to the way the stream is going, if Bob feels God is in it he will do it. ~ Bill Hybels

Will there be titty? Sure. Boom! I'm a producer. Where you been all our life, boy? We been lookin for you in Hollywood. ~ Bill Hicks

True patriotism is doing something for your country. ~ Bill Maher