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.
Interpretation
The quote advocates for responsible investment practices that prioritize environmental sustainability over profit.
Bill McKibben emphasizes the need for companies to cease lobbying efforts that undermine environmental protections and avoid dangerous fossil fuel exploration. He calls for collective action to ensure that a significant majority of fossil fuel reserves remain untapped to combat climate change, thereby promoting a sustainable and responsible approach to investment.
In practice
In a speech on corporate responsibility, you might use this quote to encourage ethical investment practices.
The religious environmental movement is potentially key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced, and it has never been captured with more breadth and force than in RENEWAL. I hope this movie is screened in church basements and synagogue social halls across the country, and that it moves many more people of faith off the fence and into action.
Remember...this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas...This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
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.
You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.
Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?
But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.
You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.
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