Bill McKibben sees an energy future bright as the sun

Author and climate activist talks about the fastest growing energy source in human history and how it will change the world

By Tim Rowland

It is a bitter irony that just as renewable energy has become cheaper to produce than fossil fuels, America finds itself saddled with a government determined to kill it.

Yet Bill McKibben, whose prophetic 1989 book “The End of Nature” was among the first clarion calls outlining the risks of a warming planet, does see hope.

Kicking off a promotional tour for his latest book “Here Comes the Sun” at a Friday evening event sponsored by Adirondack Explorer at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, McKibben discussed both the challenges and opportunities that present themselves at the one-quarter milepost of the 21st century.

“This is as difficult a moment on our planet and in our country as I can ever remember,” McKibben said. “The stuff that I started worrying about in the 1980s and the end of nature is now just what’s happening in the world. It’s happening faster and hitting harder than you would have thought 40 years ago, but it’s pretty much right on tap. The temperatures we’re now seeing on this planet are the hottest that they’ve been in at least 125,000 years.”

Compounding that, the Trump administration isn’t just ignoring solar and wind, it’s aggressively moving to stunt its development, ending tax credits for solar panels and EVs, as well as blocking wind projects and the installation of solar panels on federal land.

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Eventually market forces will win and cleaner cheaper energy will prevail, McKibben said. But the world doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for eventually.

It was about four years ago that the sun and the wind could be finally harnessed at less cost than oil and gas could be pumped from the ground. “That’s an epochal moment for human civilization,” McKibben said. “It means that if we want to, we could move very quickly to end the human habit that dates back at least 700,000 years of setting stuff on fire.”

Governments take the lead

The reason for hope is that many world and state governments are doing just that. At some point in the last 18 months, California passed a tipping point where for long stretches of the day all its energy is produced by renewables. That’s allowed it to use 40% less natural gas for generating electricity than it did just two years ago.

Texas, the hydrocarbon capital of the nation, is building out renewable infrastructure at an even faster clip. The Texas legislature, once unblinkingly in the pocket of oil and gas, has now started listening to the demands of rural residents who are reaping the benefits of cheaper renewables.

So too is China leaving Washington in the dust. “They’re not just eating our lunch, we’re sending people over in red caps to feed them our lunch,” McKibben said. Along with cheap solar panels, Chinese plants build high-quality EVs that sell for $10,000. As Detroit continues to churn out $80,000 gas-burning pickups, it will be the Chinese auto industry that dominates the world market.

“In May, the Chinese were putting up three gigawatts of solar power a day; a gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant,” McKibben said. “So they were building the equivalent of a coal-fired power plant out of solar panels every eight hours. Chinese carbon emissions have now peaked and begun to go down. They’ve dropped a percent or two just in the last six months, while America’s have increased four and a half percent over the same period.”

Discouraged Americans might take inspiration from Pakistan, where temperatures have reached 128 degrees, floods have reached biblical proportions and the government was too inept to keep the electrical grid up and running. 

“We’ve been thinking about this (renewables) as if it’s the Whole Foods of energy — nice, but pricey. But it’s really the Costco of energy. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf and ready to go. We need to deploy it, and it needs to become the great task of human beings in the next few years to deploy this as fast as we can on behalf of everyone in the world.”

— Bill McKibben

Yet in January, 2024, eagle-eyed snoopers on Google Earth began to notice something odd. It was as if the residents of Lahore and Karachi and Islamabad were suddenly sheathing their rooftops in glass. They were solar panels, imported at low cost from China. Without the help of the government, they had installed the equivalent of half the country’s electric grid within eight months.

Other nations have adopted “balcony solar,” where renters hang panels off their apartment railings and plug them into the wall. In America, that’s illegal. So too is it illegal without a parade of inspectors and code-officer visits in a nation where installing solar costs four times what it does in other nations.

“Here’s the catch: We have to do it fast to make any difference,” McKibben said. “I guess we could sort of sit back and let economics do its thing, and 30 or 40 years from now, we would run the planet on sun and wind just by virtue of the fact that it’s cheaper than anything else. But if it takes us anything like 40 years to do this, the planet that we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet.”

Call to action

McKibben called for audience members young and old to pitch in. His activist group of people aged 60 and above, called Third Act, is working to counter the manpower of oil-industry lobbyists by taking their knitting or crossword puzzles to legislative hearing rooms and waiting their turn to speak.

A significant round of activism is scheduled for SunDay, Sept. 21, which is planned as a day of clean-energy celebration and demonstrations across the country. It’s a message McKibben said he hopes will reframe the discussion about sun and wind.

Jenna Audlin, 18, and a member of the Wild Center’s Youth Climate Program, was among a number of young climate activists in the audience hoping to parlay the energy of her generation into political influence. 

“I think that sometimes it feels like we’re very isolated as young people who care about the climate,” she said. “But statistics show that the number of people that are concerned or want to take action far outweighs the amount of people who are deniers, or just in that hopeless stage.”

And the enthusiasm can be contagious. “With my own grandparents, I have that conversation all the time,” Audlin said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re doing your climate thing. You’re gonna save the world.’ And I’m like, you’re still around, what are you doing? And so I’ve got my grandma calling Congress and my grandfather having his chapter meetings at local nature centers.”

McKibben advocated this sort of action. “There’s not much we can do about Washington, but what we can do is an extraordinary amount of work at the state and local level to make real change,” he said.