Quotes from Bill McKibben

TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.

In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it's the reflex we're going to have to temper, and it's going to be tough.

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

we have developed a series of emotional thermostats as well, by far the most potent of which is television itself. instead of really experiencing the highs and lows, pains and joys, that make up a life, many of us use TV just as we use central heating- to flatten our variations, to maintain a constant "optimal" temperature.

Vermont breweries are symbols of everything that's right and good about a free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors - and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.

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.

Our criteria is that it's okay to invest in companies so long as they stop lobbying in Washington, stop exploring for new hydrocarbons, and sit down with every one else to plan to keep 80 percent of the reserves in the ground.

In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day.

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate.

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.

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 sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.

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.

We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.

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

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

When we work all over the planet, it's mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that's mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.

Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.

We had other currencies that we could find work in - the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.

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

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

We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.

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.

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.