Where does the climate movement go from here? An interview with Bill McKibben

McKibben charts a solar-powered path forward that bypasses federal gridlock and empowers communities to break free from fossil fuel dependence

By Emily Atkin and Bill McKibben

Editor’s note: This conversation between climate activist and author Bill McKibben and journalist Emily Atkin originally ran on Substack. Thanks to them both for allowing us to republish it. Join the Explorer and McKibbon at The Wild Center for a reading and discussion of his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for Climate and Fresh Chance for Civilization.

Bill McKibben: It must be kind of disorienting to realize that the fossil fuel industry is, for the moment, in charge of a lot of things.

Emily Atkin: It can make you feel like, what do we do?

BK: But here’s the interesting thing about it — they’re clearly very scared too. They’ve spent more money than they ever have on politics before. They’re doubling down in every possible way — state, local, federal. They understand that they face an unprecedented threat.

The threat they faced for 30 years was a bunch of activists causing them some trouble. We shut down some pipelines, we divested a lot of money. But now, thanks to some combination of activism and engineering, they’ve got a deeper problem on their hands for the first time.

They don’t have the cheapest power on Earth. We live on a planet where, all of a sudden, the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

EA: You know, my cynicism runs so deep. It’s like a lovely, comforting armor. But I’ve been reading some of your recent pieces on what you think is the path forward, focusing on the large-scale adoption of solar and, particularly, rooftop solar. It really broke through that armor. I was hoping you could talk about it a little bit.

BK: The reason that it was so hard to make progress on climate change for so many decades was, yes, because of the obstruction of the fossil fuel industry. But it was also because, since fossil fuel was so cheap, it was woven into every part of our economy.

Now, there’s something cheaper. And that means that the economic gravity works in our direction. The economic winds are at our backs, and the fossil fuel industry’s job is to figure out how to slow those winds down. Our job is to figure out if we can speed them up enough to begin to catch up with anything like the physics of climate change.

The good news is that there definitely are places in the world that are figuring out how to do that. China, in May, was installing 100 solar panels a second. Across China, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar power a day. A gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant. Those kinds of numbers weren’t even comprehensible until 18 months ago or so.

In the U.S., for the moment, it’s obviously not going to happen at the federal level. But there is stuff in this moment that can be done. It turns out, rooftop solar on a house-by-house basis is three times more expensive here than it is in Australia or the EU. A little bit of that’s because of tariffs on panels, but it’s mostly because we have these Byzantine permitting systems that require all kinds of inspectors up on your roof over and over again, taking on the completely non-existent epidemic of fires caused by badly installed solar panels.

So there are easy ways to figure out how to get around that. State legislatures are starting to act. But we can get it to spread to lots of places, and that’s an organizing task. That’s why we’re doing things like Sun Day.

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EA: I don’t think people realize just how freaking cool solar has become. The fossil fuel industry bros are always saying, “Solar power is intermittent, and therefore you need us.” Actually, things have changed.

BK: Here’s a number that’s probably the most encouraging number I’ve heard in all the years I’ve been working on this. California is, almost every day, producing a hundred percent of its electricity for long stretches from renewable sources. Which means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to the grid is batteries—often that have been soaking up extra sunshine all afternoon.

But the bottom line is, California, fourth largest economy on planet Earth, is this summer using 40 percent less natural gas than it did two years ago to generate electricity. If you wanna know why the fossil fuel industry is freaking out and sponsoring every bad politician on Earth, that’s why.

EA: These batteries are so amazing too. You can have this big battery in your basement you can use to power your car, or serve as a replacement for your backup diesel generator — the same generator that the fossil fuel industry said was the reason you still needed them.

BK: Where I live in Vermont, the biggest power plant is not a power plant at all. It’s the four or five thousand batteries that they’ve helped Vermonters to buy and put in their basements. When we have a hot day they can take the power out of those batteries for a few hours at the peak. It’s quite remarkable.

What’s also really remarkable and beautiful is seeing this start to happen in the places of the world that need it even more than Vermont. Pakistan’s been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. And people had lousy, expensive, unreliable electricity. But they’re also right next door to China. So people just started buying these solar panels, looking up videos on TikTok about how to install them, and putting them up on their roofs. Pakistanis put up the equivalent of half the national electric grid last year in just in solar. So the possibility for doing this is astonishing.

Of course, the problem is…

EA: We can’t do it. We don’t have the ability to do what the Pakistanis do or what the Australians do.

I don’t think a lot of people realize this, but in other countries, you don’t have to own your house to install solar. You can go buy a solar panel from the Best Buy-equivalent store and then just put it on your balcony and start generating your own clean power to reduce your own electric bill.

We don’t have that here, and we don’t have that here for a very specific reason: Because of fossil fuel controlled utility companies and lobbying and regulations that don’t allow us to go do that.

BK: Germans have put up a million and a half of these balcony solar installations. And here’s the thing. It’s not an impossible idea to imagine this happening in the United States. You know, the one state that has adopted balcony solar as of two months ago, was the deep red state of Utah.

There’s so many things that are interesting to me about solar power. In the largest sense, it’s really beautiful to imagine relying on a power source that you can’t hoard. I mean, that’s the architecture of the fossil fuel industry. That’s how they got rich. They have concentrated deposits of a resource that you could monopolize and hoard.

This is exactly the opposite. Every place on earth gets sun and wind every day. And nobody can really figure out how to stash it away. In fact, I’d wager that it’s going to be hard, even for human beings, to figure out a way to fight wars over solar power going forward. There’s also things that appeal to everyone. I live my life in both red and blue rural parts of the country. So I know lots of people who fly Trump flags. For many of them, this is an easy sell, because your home really becomes your castle once you have your own power supply. Then, you have something worth defending with your AR-15.

It’s one of the things that’s really been fun about this Sun Day thing, as it starts to gather momentum. All kinds of people are realizing, “Yeah, you know what, I don’t really like living a life in service to Big Oil, and I don’t see why I have to have it.”

EA: There’s a part in your recent Mother Jones story that got me so fired up. It was inspiring to me as a writer. I was, like, damn, Bill, you did that.

You’ve got a right to the sunshine that falls on your home, whether you’re a renter with a balcony or a homeowner… We’re used to thinking of roofs as protection from rain, but the sun can provide you a shower of dollars and cents. And some bureaucrats shouldn’t force you to stay at the mercy of Big Utility. Why should the Chinese and the Australians and the Germans get access to the sun while you’re denied it? I mean, what the hell? We’re bathed in free energy every daylight hour and we need a bunch of permits to use it? What’s American about that?

BK: One thing that’s always amazed me, Emily, is that so many people willingly live in these places with homeowner associations that tell them they can’t put up a clothesline, much less a solar panel. You have a right to do some stuff, and we should take advantage of the fact that Americans like their rights.

EA: And this is something that is well within the purview of local and state governments. That’s what’s so hopeful about it to me, that is an area where journalism can be effective, and activists can be effective. And as you point out, in places like Utah, it’s already happening. Citizens are able to lobby their own local and state governments to loosen some of these restrictions on rooftop solar.

You cited one statistic in your piece that I was blown away by: that if we were able to loosen these restrictions everywhere in the U.S., possibly we could get up to 45 percent of the energy that we need from rooftop solar.

BK: I mean, we’re still gonna need to build other things, because we use a lot of energy. But this is a great wasted resource. I’ve had solar panels on my roof for a very long time, back to when they were really expensive, because if I wasn’t going to do it, who was? And I’ve loved from the very first day, watching the meter spin backwards, and knowing that I was now depriving the utility of money.

But now we’re at a point where this should be possible. And that’s one reason we’re doing Sun Day, to get people past people’s idea that this is alternative energy. I think for most people, the place it sits in their mind is that solar is the Whole Foods of energy — nice, but pricey. It’s the Costco of energy. It’s cheap. It’s available in bulk. It’s on the shelf, ready to go. And if we could get that message across, people’s anger at the Trump administration for making it impossible to put it up, that would mount up and we’d start to see, at least in blue areas, real change.

EA: Absolutely. And the only reason it’s expensive is because of those regulations. That’s also something that was really cemented to me through reading your pieces, was that the reason it’s expensive is strictly because of these soft costs, these permitting costs that are directly imposed by not only the federal government, but state and local governments. And if we can loosen some of those costs, we can lift the fossil fuel industry’s boot off of our necks.

BK: We’re going to have to, because they’ve taken away the federal subsidies that made it possible to have a solar industry, even with sort of expensive costs for permitting and things. If you’re listening to this right now and you’ve been thinking about wanting solar power, definitely do it right away. Through midnight on New Year’s Eve, you can get the tax credit under the Biden IRA. And through the end of September, you can get the tax credit on an EV. Those things were supposed to last a decade. They’re going away in September and in December, respectively, and that’s a tremendous shame.

EA: I love the idea of really concentrating the next phase of the climate, environmental and public health movements on solar power, because it so nicely dovetails with the movement to get the oligarchs’ boots off of our necks, not to say that metaphor again. Because like you said before, you cannot hoard the sun.
BK: It’s not concentrated, and I think it’s really important for people to understand what a huge difference this makes, to move from a source of energy that’s only available in a few places to one that’s available everywhere. Eighty percent of the world lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels, not petro-states like our own.

We know enough about human nature by now to realize that if you give people the kind of power that comes with controlling resources, they’re going to use them badly. The Koch brothers were our biggest oil and gas barons, and they used their winnings to systematically degrade our democracy for three decades. In Europe, Vladimir Putin is the biggest oil and gas baron, and he’s used his winnings to launch a land war in Europe in the 21st century. We don’t need this.

EA: I do think there is one element though that we really should talk about, which is lithium mining. That’s something that a lot of my friends care about. I’ve had real conversations with them about their issues with the solar economy because of the problems with mining. As a reporter, I wouldn’t say that’s an incorrect concern.

BK: Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to write the book so I could look more closely into this, because obviously there’s no absolutely free lunch. There’s just lunches that cost less and cost more. And you do have to go mine lithium, although actually in the last year the Chinese have started outfitting cars with sodium ion batteries. Sodium is the fifth or sixth most common element in the earth. We’re not going to run out of salt anytime soon.

But think about what happens when you mine some lithium. You go put it in a battery, and it works for the next 25 years. Then, eventually, you have to recycle it—at which point we now recover almost all the lithium, because it’s valuable enough to be worth doing.

Compare that to what happens when you mine coal. When you mine cool, you set it on fire. Then, the next day you have to go mine some more coal. The volumes here are so disparate. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimated last fall that you could get all the critical minerals for the energy transition through 2050 with the same volume of mining that coal represented last year. And you know, my family comes from West Virginia. It’s not like mining coal is a benign hobby. It’s a tough, dirty, unpleasant job too.

EA: Energy is dirty work, no matter what. The question is, how long is it dirty work? Oil, coal and gas are dirty work forever. Lithium is dirty work, but you don’t have to keep doing it.

BK: 40 percent of all the ship traffic on Planet Earth is just taking coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean to burn them. If you send a boatload of solar panels across the Atlantic, it produces, in its lifetime, about 500x more energy than a boatload of coal does.

The other objection that people have — and I think it’s a real one and should be taken seriously— is that solar takes up land. But the biggest crop in America is corn. Half the corn land in America is used for growing ethanol, 30 million acres.

That’s really dumb, because you have to pour lots of nitrogen and phosphorus on them that washes downstream and causes huge pollution. And you have to spray them with herbicides and pesticides to keep weeds and bugs and things from eating them. Those cause endless ecological damage.

EA: And a cornfield is a biological desert, as you’ve written. Like, you might think a cornfield looks really natural, but there’s nothing really living there.

BK: It’s at least as industrial as a solar farm. And in fact, now we’re figuring out that there’s lots of stuff you can do in between and underneath the solar panels. Think about it for a minute, Emily. In an overheated world, shade is an increasingly valuable commodity. When you have things that are shaded, you don’t lose water anywhere near as fast as you do now in the overheated direct sunlight. There’s lots of things you can grow, and animals you can graze.

I did a little piece last year in Vermont about the people planting pollinator-friendly plantings in between the rows, insects appearing at orders of magnitude higher than they ever had or they had in decades. And all the farmers in the surrounding fields said, “You know what, the fruit in our orchards is up 40 percent because there’s suddenly pollinators here again.”

We can be much more creative with all sorts of things, with our fields, with our roofs. But we just have to get the powerful forces that like the status quo out of the way.

The status quo doesn’t work. The status quo is destroying the climate. The status is giving kids asthma. The status quo is producing this grotesque and insane inequality that’s wrecking our political life in every way.

But strange as it is to say, in the middle of the Trump era, I’m finding more room for hope than I have in decades of working on this crisis. You can almost see, if you squint, some ways out. But it won’t happen — and I don’t mean to proselytize — unless we organize. Organizing is always the cynical unknown for change.

So that’s why we’re doing Sun Day. People should go to SunDay.earth and sign up to do something locally. Whether it’s an e-bike parade or opening their heat pump to show their neighbors or putting on a solar powered concert or having a big demonstration outside the local public utility commission or whatever it is.

These are these are we have to start rebuilding our movement in real ways and it will not happen by itself. I wish it would. I’m old and tired, you know, but also committed to the proposition that we can do some things now.