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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the urgent need to address climate change, suggesting that a happy outcome is no longer possible.
Bill McKibben's quote highlights the critical state of the climate crisis, indicating that the era of easily achievable solutions has passed. Instead of hoping for a happy ending through prevention, we must now confront the reality of either enduring a difficult future or facing even more severe consequences if action is not taken. This encapsulates an urgent call for awareness and action regarding environmental issues.
In practice
In a climate awareness seminar, to stress the importance of immediate action.
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.
I realized that if I don't like something, I can change it. If I don't feel comfortable with something, then I have a voice to say it's not cool.
Great upheavals produce shock waves that widen cracks in political, economic, and security orders. Sometimes the old orders break. Yet it can be in the power of leaders and peoples to shape the directions of change.
When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.
Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.
Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.
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