Bill McKibben Quotes

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

The American Republican Party is the last political bastion of the fossil fuel industry - now so in tow to the fossil fuel industry that it cannot face up to the realities of carbon pollution and climate change.

I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.

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.

We must reduce the emissions 100 percent. In Venezuela, the emissions are currently insignificant compared to the emissions of the developed countries.

Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels - which is not going to happen - it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.

We can't bankrupt Exxon. But we can politically and morally bankrupt them.

I am convinced that policies meant to reduce alleged carbon dioxide-induced global warming will be destructive.

Ultimate success for a carbon tax would mean so complete a shift to renewable energy that the tax would stop raising much revenue at all.

The growing evidence of climate change is forcing attention on carbon emissions and their reduction.

The divestment movement is a start at challenging the excesses of capitalism. It's working to delegitimize fossil fuels and showing that they're just as unethical as profits from the tobacco industry.

Fracking locks the U.K. into an industry that is based on fossil fuels long after our country needs to have moved to renewables.

Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel available for electricity generation. The most urgent threat to climate policy is the scale of new investments in unabated coal-fired electricity generation still being planned.

If you're serious about climate targets, you don't build and expand the oil sands and move from coal-fired electricity to inefficient fracked gas.

Look, I don't have the millions of dollars that Exxon has. But I've got comedy. I've got satire. I've got stars.

We cannot afford to burn the vast majority of known fossil fuel reserves.

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.

There is no high-carbon future

Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

Our oil-based society depends on non-renewable resources. It requires relentless probing into vast reaches of pristine land, sacrificing vital bioregions, and irreplaceable cultures. The possibility of catastrophic climate change is substantially increased by the 40 million barrels of oil burned every day by vehicles. We must all move shoulder to shoulder in a unified front to show this administration that the true majority of people are willing to vote for a cleaner environment and won't back down.

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.

When I was ambushed by global warming advocates recently - no, they haven't given up - they asked me the same questions they always ask: "What if you're wrong?" and "If you're wrong will you apologize to future generations?" I always answer, "What if you're wrong? Will you apologize to my twenty kids and grandkids for the largest tax increase in American history?" They usually don't have anything to say after that.

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.

It's absolutely not acceptable for people to argue that, if we are going to do anything about climate change at all, well, the responsibility lies solely with the individual.