Bill McKibben Quotes

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

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

I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.

There are so many symptoms of this disease it's hard to know where to start to catalogue them, but just look at the effects on hydrology - on the way water moves around the planet.

The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.

The world is on fire, and I'm doing my best to help steer the firetruck.

No one is strong enough  -  given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.

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

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

The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.

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.

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.

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.

Look - every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.

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.

In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it's more or less been over since 1995.

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.

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.

In the end, climate change is a math problem.

The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.

We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.

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

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.

I guess the underlying principle might be, don't make it too easy for them to stereotype you.

I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.

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.

Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.

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.

My house is covered in solar panels, I'm a great believer in all this - we all should be doing this.

Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.

When we work all over the planet, it's mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that's mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.

[Barack Obama] done some good things, he's done a couple of bad things. He's obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and... lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he's been weak on it.

Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

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.

Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.

Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.

Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.

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.

By themselves, they are not enough; we also need to engage in political action.

I think that it is impossible to think of a threat to social justice greater than what we are doing to the earth's atmosphere at the moment.

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.

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.

One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.

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.

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.

It now appears that the fracturing of that ice is happening much more quickly than people previously thought, apparently at a slow melt.

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.

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.

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.

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.