Bill McKibben Quotes

Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.

Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we're already messing with a system we don't understand.

Clearly there’s going to be an impact. So I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions are in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It will have a warming impact. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.

Climate change is a consequence of the build up of greenhouse gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere, and virtually all these emissions came from the rich countries.

The jury is still out on whether humans are causing climate change.

Of course climate changes. Many changes are due to factors over which humans have no control, such as winds, ocean currents, and sun activity. But the liberals want us to believe that climate change is also caused by gases expelled when humans burn so-called fossil fuels.

I don't know the science behind climate change. I can't say one way or another what is the direct impact, whether it's man-made or not.

Most climate debates have focused on cutting the use of fossil fuels. But besides a few high-profile scuffles over fuel extraction in vulnerable wild places like the offshore Arctic, political leaders have ignored fossil fuel production as a necessary piece of climate strategy.

Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.

The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured. It's uncontroversial. It's going up. We know that has a tendency to warm the atmosphere and we should be worried about that.

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.

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

Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.

Air is one we hold in common; it has a limited carrying capacity for pollutants and that's being used up by those who pollute the atmosphere. So we have to stop that externality. We would never allow a utility to put their coal slag in a dump truck and back it up to the city park and dump it in unlimited amounts for free. But that is exactly what we do with carbon dioxide and methane.

If Africa is left behind, she is going to continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon. She's going to continue logging the forests, she's going to continue burning charcoal, she is going to continue practicing agricultural activities that destroy the environment, and sooner or later Africa's problem will become a global problem.

What we put into the atmosphere in terms of burning fuel is unprecedented.

The evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere.

If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.

Anything greater than 350 of parts of carbon dioxide per million is more than the planet can safely deal with. It is what's overwhelming our climate system. Because we've been going up about three parts per million per year. And eventually, we will always be above 410, and then above 420, and above 430. We just keep pouring more carbon into the atmosphere.

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all.

Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

Our atmosphere can't tell the difference between emissions from an Asian factory, the exhaust from a North American SUV, or deforestation in South America or Africa.

Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen...We risk damages on a scale larger than the two world wars of the last century.

Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill.