Top 90 Bill McKibben Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.”

— Bill McKibben

2. “Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.”

— Bill McKibben

3. “If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.”

— Bill McKibben

4. “We’ve built a new Earth. It’s not as nice as the old one; it’s the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever.”

— Bill McKibben

5. “The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.”

— Bill McKibben

6. “The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.”

— Bill McKibben

7. “The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.”

— Bill McKibben

8. “We’ve been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.”

— Bill McKibben

9. “We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.”

— Bill McKibben

10. “Very few people on earth ever get to say: ‘I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing.’ If you’ll join this fight that’s what you’ll get to say.”

— Bill McKibben

11. “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don’t quite know it yet.”

— Bill McKibben

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

— Bill McKibben

13. “We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity.”

— Bill McKibben

14. “There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.”

— Bill McKibben

15. “Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.”

— Bill McKibben

16. “In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.”

— Bill McKibben

17. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

18. “The movers and shakers on our planet, aren’t the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.”

— Bill McKibben

19. “If there’s horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we’re no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.”

— Bill McKibben

20. “Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.”

— Bill McKibben

21. “TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.”

— Bill McKibben

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

— Bill McKibben

23. “With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we’re holding the fossil fuel industry in check, the engineers in the renewable energy world are undercutting them from the other side.”

— Bill McKibben

24. “When you are in a hole, stop digging!”

— Bill McKibben

25. “We all need to be reminded that democracy isn’t just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future.”

— Bill McKibben

26. “A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.”

— Bill McKibben

27. “You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet.”

— Bill McKibben

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

— Bill McKibben

29. “I’ve sat behind a microphone and listened for decades as Americans learned to stop talking with each other and start shouting instead. No discussions, just ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist’ or ‘feminazi’ or ‘bigot’ or whatever. So here’s what I want to say, and I think it’s the one thing no one ever says any more in our public life: I think you’re wrong, but you may be right .”

— Bill McKibben

30. “According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually.”

— Bill McKibben

31. “What we’re talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It’s going to take us a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put ourselves.”

— Bill McKibben

32. “There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.”

— Bill McKibben

33. “The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.”

— Bill McKibben

34. “I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.”

— Bill McKibben

35. “If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don’t have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.”

— Bill McKibben

36. “The earth is a museum of divine intent.”

— Bill McKibben

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

— Bill McKibben

38. “The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.”

— Bill McKibben

39. “We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves – that is what all this boils down to.”

— Bill McKibben

40. “A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.”

— Bill McKibben

41. “The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don’t bargain.”

— Bill McKibben

42. “There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.”

— Bill McKibben

43. “We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.”

— Bill McKibben

44. “The snow was coming down so hard. It looked like the flakes were hurrying to get out of the sky so the next ones would have room to fall.”

— Bill McKibben

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

— Bill McKibben

46. “These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.”

— Bill McKibben

47. “If you want honey you need a hive of bees. But if you were trying to decide if making honey was a good idea, bees would be the last creatures to ask.”

— Bill McKibben

48. “Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question.”

— Bill McKibben

49. “TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We’re discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.”

— Bill McKibben

50. “The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When Im home, Im a pretty green fellow.”

— Bill McKibben