Bill McKibben Quotes

By speeding the transition to cleaner energy, we can improve the lives of billions of people, while also reducing the risks we face from a changing climate.

Solar power is going to be absolutely essential to meeting growing energy demands while staving off climate change.

We need a greening of globalisation.

For decades science has been warning us that we are compromising earth’s systems, and that none of us will be immune to the consequences. Everywhere you look, people are trying: adopting renewable energy, working to guarantee women control over their reproductive decisions, fighting food waste, shifting to plant-based diets. Maybe the most important thing the rest of us can do is take our fingers out of our ears and join them.

If everyone that has agreed to the Paris Agreement wants to meet their targets they are going to have to make renewables part of the equation. There's no other way out of it.

If we can speed up the deployment of clean energy technologies in developing countries with investments from the Green Climate Fund, hundreds of millions of people will be able to access electricity for the first time - with all the education, health, communication and entrepreneurial opportunities electricity enables.

I support a Green New Deal to put people to work building a renewable green energy infrastructure that can help us fight climate change and protect our communities.

Our children will work in energy tomorrow - they just won't work in fossil fuels, in the meantime, for social justice, economic justice and stability, we need ... negotiated, planned outcomes that people can touch at both the national and industry and enterprise level.

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.

Taking bold climate action now has the potential to unleash the full power of business and at the same time lift millions of people out of poverty. We're the first generation to recognize this and the last generation that will have this opportunity.

The new energy future is decentralised, entrepreneurial and needs people like you to say 'Give me a clean car, give me solar shingles to put on my roof - give me a clean future'

I'm the one candidate that can really stand up for what it is that the American people are really clamoring for. And that means jobs, an emergency jobs program. We call for the creation of 20 million jobs, to solve the emergency of climate change, and we call for 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2030.

Remember that the problem is bigger than the car you drive or the types of lightbulbs in city hall. We need a fundamental shift away from dirty fossil fuels that spew carbon pollution. To make that happen, we need to put pressure on our leaders to take the bold actions necessary to move us off dirty sources of energy.

To build a power plant and run lines to houses, to huts, to anything is a tremendous amount of work...how about...just giving them the service where they need it-on the roof of their hut.

The dirty energy crowd can be offset only by the power of the rising clean energy sector and the American people, aroused across party lines.

Maybe we have enough technology to save the planet but it is not enough because the people are not ready.

The good news is that we've seen in recent years significant reductions in the cost of solar panels and wind production. We know how significant an impact we can have by moving towards energy efficiency and transforming our transportation system. So we know what has to be done. We have to develop the political will to do it, and, as president, this would be an issue of huge concern to me.

I'm saying you should have the right not only to be an energy consumer but an energy producer. Follow the money to understand why my message keeps getting drowned out. Big oil and big coal are terrified by the green jobs message.

The governor of Texas was a real climate change, well, "skeptic" would be a nice way of phrasing it. Still, though, Texas is a leader in renewables. So, what I care about is what politicians are actually doing, not what they are saying.

We're clearly coming to the end of the fossil fuel era. We have the technology to shift to renewable energy, we have the will of the people. The only thing that's keeping us back is the fossil fuel industry's hold on our political system. That's what we need to change.

We are living in revolutionary times. The good news is we have everything we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. All we need is for you to join the rest of the world to bring about a cleaner, more stable, and peaceful future.

Both of our nations [America and Germany] were proud to join the Paris Climate Agreement which the world should work to implement quickly. Continued global leadership on climate in addition to increasing private investment and clean energy is gonna be critical to meeting this growing threat.

The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in...

I'm willing to engage or indulge real ideas, but if we don't do something [about global warming], we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f--ing disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.

We've introduced the New Apollo Energy Act, which is, I think, safe to say the most comprehensive and aggressive bill that has been introduced in Congress because it does have the scale, scope, and ambition of the original Apollo Project, and it attacks the problem in every way you can imagine. There's no silver bullet here, but there are lots of opportunities.