Quotes from Bill McKibben

Most of the time now we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of our consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half-truth at best—

We already have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as any scientist thinks is safe to burn.

Privilege lies in obliviousness. (White privilege, for instance, involves being able to reliably forget that race matters.)

Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is / organic wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man

When, in Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael refuses to answer. "Let it speak," he says, "the Maker's high magnificence, who built / so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far; / That man may know he dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill, / Lodg'd in a small partition, and the rest / Ordain'd for uses to his Lord best known.

I admire beavers because…they keep at it.

Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago.

A simple calculation shows that the temperature in the arctic regions would rise about eight to nine degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased to two and a half or three times its present value.

I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.

And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we've done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

We have, in other words, changed the energy balance of our planet, the amount of the sun's heat that is returned to space. Those of us who burn lots of fossil fuel have changed the way the world operates, fundamentally.

If an alien landed in the United States on some voyage of exploration, he might well report back to headquarters that we were bipedal devices for combusting fossil fuel.

In fact, total global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade.

When the peak temperature in leafy suburbs can be lower by as much as fifteen degrees, "landscape is a predictor for mobidity in heatwaves," in the words of one study, which found that African Americans were "52% more likely than white people to live in areas of unnatural 'heat risk-related land cover.'" Imagine what it's like in a refugee camp, or a prison. It's hell, is what it is.

Rebelling against the wishes and hopes of your parents is how a great many of us define who we are. It may be hard, and it may be painful, and some people may never manage it. And some never need to, because their parents were wise and gentle enough to help them down a congenial path.

Barack Obama sounded a familiar note: "This is our generation's moment to save future generations from global catastrophe." Here's his opponent, John McCain, a few months later: "We and the other nations of the world must get serious about substantially

we really do live on an unbearably beautiful planet. We don't think of it often as a planet - - we live our daily lives on flat and often prosaic ground, and when we're in the air, the flight attendant usually makes us lower the window shade so as not to interfere iwth the movie.

On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation in under way. It took you a while to get there, so you're obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like visiting in an older sense of the word, and you bring with you the news of the road, not the news you heard on All Things Considered .

Arnold Schwarzenegger, signing new energy legislation: "I want to make California No. 1 in the fight against global warming. This is something we owe our children and grandchildren." And Arnold at the United Nations: "We hold the future in our hands. Together we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences.

Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action The Evangelical Climate Initiative 2006

the world in 2100 would have about 600 parts per million carbon dioxide. That is, we'd live if not in hell, then in some place with a very similar temperature.

It's as if we'd conjured up out of nowhere a second human population that's capable of burning coal and oil and gas nearly as fast as we do.

only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. Only in a culture of hyperindividualism would it occur to you to do what you wanted without reference to anyone else—

Lincoln said that cultivating even 'the smallest quantity' of ground bred freedom and independence. 'Ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.