Bill McKibben Quotes - Page 10

I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There's real hunger out there.

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?

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.

[Political actions] has to happen on the local and state level; we have to convince our cities to join the growing number of more than 200 American cities who have signed on to the mayor's climate campaign.

We have to get our states to adopt what are called "renewable portfolio standards" pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.

The fact that Washington has been a complete logjam for anything for the last six years has got to change because we need to have federal policy that really allows us to move quickly and nimbly.

We had other currencies that we could find work in - the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.

The flaw is the business plan - digging up and burning way more carbon than physics says we can deal with. So, I suppose it's some kind of mid-point between writing them nice letters asking them to stop and figuring out a way to take down the entire system- which I don't have any idea how to do.

Policies that engage us again in the international fight for real climate protection.

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that's how one would do it - lots and lots of people saying "we're severing our ties".

We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.

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.

If Apple is enslaving Chinese to make its iPhones, you don't need to eat the i-Phone, you need to make sure that Apple is paying a living wage to someone, and then it adds a dollar to the cost of iphones, and everybody's cool.

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

If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.

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

We've been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone's completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that's too high. It's not a very complicated idea.

We're putting more carbon into the atmosphere than the atmosphere can absorb. And everybody told us when we started, coz we knew nothing when we started - we still don't know very much - but everybody told us 'this is crazy, you don't use a scientific data point, it's a number, people don't respond to numbers'.

I think we need to think of lots of ways to communicate. And we tried some at 350. We organised what they called the largest art project in the planet's history. We do a lot with art and music and things.

We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.

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.

With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we're holding the fossil fuel industry in check, the engineers in the renewable energy world are undercutting them from the other side.

Scientists are telling us that 350 parts per million [of carbon] in the atmosphere is the upper limit. We're at 387 parts per million now, and we're up in that zone where the risk of going past irrevocable tipping points is elevated. It's no different than going to a doctor and learning your cholesterol is too high, and you're at risk for a heart attack. You have to work to lower your cholesterol and hope to get there before the heart attack comes.