110+ Bill McKibben Quotes On Education, Climate Change And Democracy

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is best known as the founder of the grassroots climate change movement 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. He is also the author of several books, including The End of Nature, Deep Economy, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Following is our collection on famous quotes by Bill McKibben on education, climate change, democracy.

Top 10 Bill McKibben Quotes

1. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"
2. Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.
3. Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
4. We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.
5. 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.
6. We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
7. There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
8. The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
9. 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.
10. We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.

Bill McKibben Short Quotes

• The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.
• But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
• You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
• If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.
• We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.
• I'm not sure I'm a very good source of advice since we're kind of making this up as we go along.
• Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.
• No one is strong enough  -  given the magnitude of the task, everyone has to step up their game.
• Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.
• Renewable energy is far more labor-intensive than fossil fuel production.

Bill McKibben Quotes About Climate Change

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. — 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

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

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. — Bill McKibben

To me, it's more important to take the 60-70% of people who really understand that there's a problem [of climate change] and get some percentage of them active than to try and stamp out the last embers of pre-scientific thought. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

In the end, climate change is a math problem. — Bill McKibben

Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem, for two reasons. One is the habits of the West in terms of consumption. The other is the incredible iniquity between poor countries and rich countries on this planet. — Bill McKibben

I think that some of it is electoral - helping candidates that are willing to take dramatic actions, not just to say a few words about how climate change might be a problem. — Bill McKibben

The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think. — Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben Quotes About Politics

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

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

[The Maldives] they've become deeply politically engaged - just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N. — Bill McKibben

I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former. — Bill McKibben

We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change. — Bill McKibben

[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. — Bill McKibben

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

The polling data shows not an unbelievable level of concern [on climate issue] but a general awareness of this problem. And now I think it's up to all sorts of people who really care about these things to continue on this new ground to try and make this the central political issue it needs to be. — Bill McKibben

We're going to need that kind of movement, because the fossil fuel industry is a sprawling adversary - at work everywhere, its tentacles in everybody's politics, invulnerable, I think, to direct frontal assault, but probably more brittle than it guesses if we come at it from all sides. — Bill McKibben

I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else. — Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben Quotes About Nature

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

After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other. — 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

In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains. — Bill McKibben

Unfortunately, The End of Nature turns out to be correct, although I wish it were not so. The only places that I was incorrect was, as with environmental science at the time, the estimation of the speed at which we see the effects of global warming. — 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

I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder. — Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben Quotes About Leader

I'm far less a leader than a writer. — Bill McKibben

We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky. — 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

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. — Bill McKibben

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

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

I can't tell how moving it is to open my email and see a picture of 1,500 Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh forming a human 350 against the backdrop of the melting glaciers. This is not their fault, and yet they're stepping up to be part of the solution. — Bill McKibben

For the first time in 150 years, the USDA reported there were more farms in America, not fewer. That has to make you happy. — 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

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

All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community. — Bill McKibben

We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will. — Bill McKibben

I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward. — Bill McKibben

We've built a new Earth. It's not as nice as the old one; it's the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever. — 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

In the States we've had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate. — Bill McKibben

Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance. — Bill McKibben

TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things. — Bill McKibben

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other. — Bill McKibben

I think fracking for gas will reduce the incentive to turn to renewables, and I think it will do a lot of other damage across the countryside. — 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

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 am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being. — Bill McKibben

In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We've seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent . — 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

According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually — 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

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

Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on. — Bill McKibben

Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

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

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. — 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

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. — Bill McKibben

One of my favorite places is the Maldives, an all-Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean with a culture that stretches back 5,000 years. But since the highest point in the archipelago is a meter or two above sea level, even the next hundred are not guaranteed. They've committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth by 2020, building windmills as fast as they can. — Bill McKibben

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

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. — 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

I think communities of faith are extremely important in this question. I think that all faith communities share a common and unusual distinction in our time of being the only institutions left that can posit some goal other than accumulation for human existence. I think that's enormously important because it is that drive for consumption more than anything else that fuels the environmental devastation around us. — Bill McKibben

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

Permafrost in the soil [is melting], in the boreal and arctic areas in the world, and, probably even more alarming in the last six or eight months, the data on what is happening to the ice shelves in Greenland and the west Antarctic has begun to cause people to radically reassess the earlier conviction that those ice shelves were stable on a kind of century-long time scale. — Bill McKibben

I've got no advice. You guys know where you are and what will work. Just know that there are people all over the place working on this and that there's a great deal of solidarity around the world and we should try to build this big, sprawling movement that looks like the kind of energy system that we want - building lots of solar panels on lots of rooftops that are all interconnected. — Bill McKibben

We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial. — Bill McKibben

For those of us who worry more about working people than about windfall profits for oil companies, it may net out. A better question is: what does it do to our economy if we manage to overheat the earth? This summer's drought provides a small taste. — Bill McKibben

In the States, the movement's actually gotten much much much stronger. There really was no climate movement so to speak before that - I think because everybody assumed that reasonable heads would prevail and do the right thing - and why would you need to have a huge movement in order to cause our leaders to deal with the most serious problem that they face. In a rational world you wouldn't. They would deal with it. — Bill McKibben

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

Everybody was cratered after Copenhagen. If the movie had worked the way that it should have, if it had been scripted by Holywood, the world would have come together and addressed the biggest problem it ever had faced and delegates would have embraced each other, and it all would have been a good happy scene instead of the complete farce and debacle that it turned into - maybe in certain ways, an absolute low point for human diplomacy. — Bill McKibben

We'd won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren't going to win. — Bill McKibben

You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history. — Bill McKibben

That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century. — Bill McKibben

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. — 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 me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can. — Bill McKibben

We finally know where the red line for climate really is. After the rapid melt of arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our best scientists, led by NASA's Jim Hansen, went back to work and produced a series of papers showing that with more than 350 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." — Bill McKibben

We'd like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness. — Bill McKibben

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'. — Bill McKibben

Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal. — 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

Climate change is a huge problem, an almost insoluble problem. — Bill McKibben

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

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. — Bill McKibben

Absent the net, we certainly couldn't have organized in 190 countries around the world. It's no substitution for face to face interaction - that's why we have "days of action" where people are in real contact with each other - but it's the cheap (and low-carbon) way to do an awful lot of the planning and organizing. And we can build, for $20k, a website as good as one Exxon can build for $20 million. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy. — Bill McKibben

Especially in recent years, the more and more we understand what we are doing, the more we have the science to tell us what we're doing, the fact that we continue to do it without taking steps to address it strikes me as, among many other things, irreverent in an extreme. — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information. — Bill McKibben

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

I do a certain amount of work in religious communities on these issues. It's not the central focus of my work but it is certainly an area where I have worked a lot. It has gotten much better over the years, especially over the last couple years. There wasn't a religious environmental movement 15 years ago, but there is now - in the Catholic community, the Jewish community, the mainline Protestant community, and in the Evangelical community. — Bill McKibben

There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S. — Bill McKibben

There's a part of all of us whose impulse is to say, "Let's keep everything the same until I die and then you can do whatever you want afterward." And that's a difficult part. — Bill McKibben

In the States, I think, the syllogism goes like this: 'free markets solve all problems. Free markets aren't solving global warming, QED global warming is not a problem'. It's not a very good syllogism but it's emotionally comforting if you're in that world. — Bill McKibben

That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly. — Bill McKibben

We'll never get there if we let the climate crisis bloom unchecked, so for the moment the key is to organize, organize, organize! — Bill McKibben

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. — Bill McKibben

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

I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible. — Bill McKibben

All the signs of incipient activism and uprising, from Tahrir square to Zuccotti Park to [the recent] shutdown of the Internet to protest web censorship. People are getting smart and getting connected. — 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

I don't think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don't want to be involved in this enterprise. — Bill McKibben

Life Lessons by Bill McKibben

1. Bill McKibben's work has taught us that we must take action to protect our environment, as it is the only one we have.
2. He has shown us that we must be willing to make sacrifices in order to preserve the environment for future generations.
3. He has also shown us that we must be willing to work together to create a better future for our planet.