Skip to content

World Quotes by Bill McKibben

43 World quotes by Bill McKibben

All World quotes Bill McKibben’s page

Bill McKibben warns that the world is on fire and we must try to steer the firetruck. He points out that a tiny rich elite and a huge poor majority make the planet unstable. He also says a future powered by sun and wind is more local and less concentrated than coal.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

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

Image

Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this…

Image

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the…

Image

Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level…

Image

I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth…

Image

Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's…

Image

It was huge mistake to avoid working with the rest of the world because (a) we're the largest source of the problem:…

Image

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never…

Image

At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you…

Image

The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world…

Image

We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close…

Image

That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really…

Image

In the States, the movement's actually gotten much much much stronger. There really was no climate movement so to speak before that…

Image

It is a complete embarrassment and literally shameful that the country that first of all invented environmentalism and gave it to the…

Image

Absent the net, we certainly couldn't have organized in 190 countries around the world. It's no substitution for face to face interaction…

Image

These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel,…

Image

We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's…

Image

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world.…

Image

There hadn't really been a climate movement, per se. I think everyone spent twenty years thinking that if we just keep pointing…

Image

Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause…

Image

Do I think that people should in the best of all possible worlds have to go to jail for wanting the US…

Image

In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: 'free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren't solving global warming, QED…

Image

[Kids] will grow up into a world that's difficult and wonderful, and they'll make the best of it they can, and hopefully…

Image

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on…

Image

I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is…

Image

In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in…

Image

When we work all over the planet, it's mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that's mostly what the…

Image

The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet…

Image

It's much to the credit of the rest of the world that they have gone ahead and tried to do the Kyoto…

Image

With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we're holding the fossil fuel industry…

Image

We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and…

Image

When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're…

Image

Everybody was cratered after Copenhagen. If the movie had worked the way that it should have, if it had been scripted by…

Image

Permafrost in the soil [is melting], in the boreal and arctic areas in the world, and, probably even more alarming in the…

Image

We've lost half the summer sea ice in the Arctic. We've wiped out an enormous percentage of the world's coral reefs. We…

Image

... the constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be…

Image

I've got no advice. You guys know where you are and what will work. Just know that there are people all over…

Image

If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities?…

Image

I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long…

Image

Other authors on World

More by Bill McKibben

I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to…

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

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.

My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to…

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

“The snow was coming down so hard. It looked like the flakes were hurrying to get out of the sky so the next ones…

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

“I’ve sat behind a microphone and listened for decades as Americans learned to stop talking with each other and start shouting instead. No discussions,…

People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated…

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…

Everything that the administration has done has been counterproductive.

We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back…

everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely…

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

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…