All BILL MCKIBBEN Quotes about “Fossil Fuels”

“If [a student's] collegeâ€™s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they wonâ€™t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.”

“Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free”
“We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)”
“You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet”
“Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially.”
“Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast.”
“I did very much like [Barack] Obama's attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we'll try to push it forward.”
“We have to figure out ways to scare and entice our leaders more effectively than the fossil fuel industry has managed to scare and entice them. They've got the big checkbooks. We've got to have the big crowd.”
“I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.”
“I try not to be either optimistic or pessimistic. I try not to think about outcomes on that scale. My job, it seems to me, is to wake up every morning and figure out how to cause as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as I can.”
“We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.”
“I think that so far the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry has trumped all else.”
“We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.”
“Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.”
“I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.”
“We'd like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.”
“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.”
“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.”

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