Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben
William Ernest "Bill" McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the anti-carbon campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his firstin 1989 about climate change...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
CountryUnited States of America
talking pipeline temperature
We're clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We've already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We've got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we've already emitted. What we're talking about now is whether we're going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one.
years feet waiting
If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.
math fuel fossils
We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
powerful thinking names
We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.
goal people understanding
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.
challenges important tendencies
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.
running advent advent-christmas
Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
warning wake-up 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.
oil average seductive
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.
country talking ice
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.
healthy balance fuel
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
country hard-work thinking
Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem.
home levels spare-time
Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.
college guarantees use
If [a student's] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.