Here Comes the Sun: A Win on Climate Is Still Possible, and Every Generation Must Pitch In, McKibben Says

There’s no guarantee that we have time to reverse climate change and dodge its worst impacts, but renewable energy gives us our best shot, says Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and now Th!rd Act, which mobilizes people over 60 for action on climate and justice.

“Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history,” he writes on the landing page for his new book, Here Comes the Sun. “If we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.”

In this interview with The Energy Mix Publisher Mitchell Beer, McKibben says everyone has a role to play—and older generations are mobilizing for the fight. The interview has been lightly edited for length and flow.

The Energy Mix: Well, Bill, thank you so much for joining us, for doing this.

Bill McKibben: Pleasure to be with you, man.

The Mix: You see hope when so many of our colleagues and allies see despair. What’s making the difference for you?

McKibben: I’ve been at work on the climate crisis for basically my entire adult life. I wrote the first book about what we then called the greenhouse effect back in the 1980s. And the sudden explosion of solar and wind energy over the last three years is the first time we’ve had anything that’s really started to scale in a way that might make a difference in how hot the planet eventually gets.

Sometime in the course of this decade, we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that’s a potentially epochal moment for our species.

It gives us the chance, the only chance that we’ve yet had, not to stop global warming—too late for that—but perhaps to stop it short of the place where it just cuts civilization off at the knees. It’s still an outside chance, because we have to move extremely fast to take advantage of these new technologies if they’re going to help bail us out. But at least there’s something here now that we can do.

We look around the few places in the world that have really done the job and we start seeing remarkable results. In May, China, which is at the forefront of all of this, was putting up a gigawatt of solar panels, the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant, every eight hours. California, which in the United States has done the most, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago.

That’s the fourth-largest economy in the world. So those are the kind of numbers that allow us to at least dream a little bit that there’s something worth working for.

The Mix: Is that why you’re releasing a new book now?

McKibben: I want very much for people to sense the possibility. We’ve spent so many years calling this stuff alternative energy that it’s sort of embedded in that way in our brain, that it’s always going to be a kind of minor part of the picture. But within a few years, it’ll be the biggest source of energy on the planet. It’s growing faster than any energy source in history.

We need it to grow maybe 50% faster than it is now to be on track for the Paris agreement climate targets. That’s hard, and we’ll have to push hard to make it happen. But it’s not mathematically insane. It’s within the realm of possibility.

Now the difficulty here, of course, is that the climate breakdown is happening in exactly the same years. I don’t know whether we can go fast enough to catch up. But I know we need to try.

The Mix: There’s a baked in assumption among decision-makers, among project planners, among regulators, that small, distributed renewable energy projects that can install at the scale you’re talking about are hard to get done, but a new pipeline or oil sands installation is easy. When in fact, there’s also a whole body of literature that says projects that big are too big to succeed. It makes you wonder why the Trans Mountain Pipeline is costing Canadian taxpayers $34 billion but, y’know, what’s $34 billion among friends?

McKibben: When you think about the amount of solar you could put up with $34 billion, you get a sense of things. And the truth here is that this stuff is easy to put up. You can build big solar farms in a matter of months. You can put up big offshore wind energy installations in 18 months, start to finish. That’s how long it takes to get the blueprints drawn up for a new gas-fired power plant. The speed with which we can do this is one of the real advantages.

What you can’t do is make money for the same people in the same amounts. And that’s what gets in the way of our political and economic system. If I know that California is using 40% less natural gas to make electricity, you can be certain that Exxon and Chevron are well aware of it.

That’s why Big Oil spent more money on last year’s election cycle in my country than they’ve ever done before. And it’s why they’re now being rewarded with a whole variety of measures designed to slow this transition down, which may succeed. I mean, it’s possible that 20 years from now, America will be a kind of museum of internal combustion that other people will visit to see what the olden days were like.

But it’s not going to slow the rest of the world down much, I don’t think.

The Mix: You’ve talked about today’s combination of activism, engineering, and I love your term, economic gravity, as the deeper problem the fossil industry faces. How do those factors complete each other? And how do you see citizen action scaling up in tandem with the technology?

McKibben: Activism has always been a key part of this story. The reason we have cheap solar power is that activists in Germany 25 years ago used their leverage as the Green Party, holding the balance of power in their parliamentary system, to demand a feed-in tariff. Germany spent a lot of money on expensive solar power 25 years ago, producing the demand that allowed the Chinese to get good at building these things cheaply.

Now we need more activism to push hard. In our country, we’re organizing Sun Day on the autumnal equinox, September 21, and as these things happen it seems to be leaking across the border a little bit into Canada.

What we need to do is drive home for people the understanding that we’re in a new world. People still think of solar power as the Whole Foods of energy—y’know, nice, but pricey. In fact, it’s the Costco of power. It’s cheap. It’s available in bulk. It’s on the shelf, ready to go.

If we can get that message across, then we’re getting somewhere.

The Mix: We’ve begun hearing, in places in Canada that would not be considered “blue” districts in the U.S., that you don’t embrace renewables because of all the jobs that will remain in the community once the solar farm is built, because once it’s built, it doesn’t need very many people to maintain. What they want that solar capacity for is that at 6¢ per kilowatt hour, it brings in the manufacturing that will help that fossil fuel community diversify out of what it’s been dependent on forever. It’ll be real economic, diversification, not into solar, but thanks to solar.

McKibbon: Absolutely. And remember, it’s money that stays in your community. Around the world, 80% of people live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuel. Even within petro-states like the United States. My state, Vermont, tiny state, spends $2 billion a year on fossil fuel. It’s just a cheque we write to Houston or Saudi Arabia, instead of taking advantage of the sun and the wind that fall within our borders.

There’s something very transformative about this paradigm shift. We have to do it for climate reasons. If we don’t, the game is up. But if we do it, we get a whole series of other benefits. And one of them, I think, is the reduction in power of the people that happen to control the quite scarce and rare deposits of fossil fuel. That control has given them more power than they need.

The third reason beyond climate and power is that burning stuff is bad for people. Nine million people a year die on this planet, about one death in five, from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. If you’ve been to Delhi recently, you know what I’m talking about. And all of that is unnecessary now. We have a benign, indeed, a beautiful way to produce energy, energy from heaven, not from hell. That’s the mantra.

The Mix: The Franklin County Energy Project in Massachusetts knew this in 1980. They knew that a home weatherization program would help them with their local balance of payments, whether their “imported”’ oil came from Saudi Arabia or Texas. So it’s really nice to hear you bring that argument back and in a time when we can actually do something about it at scale.

McKibben: When you start thinking about the world as a whole, you really get the sense of that. We talk a lot about poor countries and their balance of payments crisis and the constant debt circle that they’re in. When you go look at the numbers, generally what that means is coming up with enough money to pay for the next tanker full of diesel that’s out in the harbour. India spent the equivalent of 5% of its GDP last year importing fossil fuel. That’s an astonishing amount of money for a giant country to be spending on this one thing they don’t need, because having spent a lot of time in India, there’s more than enough sunshine there to get done what needs doing.

The Mix: There is so much astonishing disinformation and misinformation going around about the local solutions we’re talking about demonstrating and now scaling. How do we get communities to buy in to the most promising local climate solutions when they aren’t already inside the climate bubble?

McKibben: That’s one of the reasons for Sun Day. We’re finding that there’s intuitive support for renewable energy, especially solar energy, across ideological and partisan lines. Sometimes for different reasons, like if you’re an arch-conservative, you may think your home is your castle, and if you have solar panels on the roof it really is your castle, y’know?

The Mix: And I don’t want that damn utility telling me what to do, right?

McKibben: And that works. We can work with that.

Across Europe in the last year and a half, there’s been this revolution for apartment dwellers with what we’re calling balcony solar. A million and a half Germans have gone to whatever they call Best Buy there and come back with a solar panel and plugged it into their wall. And they’re often producing a quarter of their energy.

You can’t do that anywhere in the U.S. Except the state of Utah, which a couple of months ago, on the urging of a libertarian Republican state legislature, passed an enabling law allowing balcony solar to happen there.

We need to do that kind of thing across the country, installing rooftop solar in the United States is about three times more expensive than it is in, say, Australia or the UK, mostly because of Byzantine local permitting. There are 10,000 jurisdictions in this country and each one has its own set of rules, so it takes forever to get the drawings, make the permits.

Now there’s a federally approved solar app that allows for automated permitting, and we’re going to spread it across the country. It’s obviously a hard time politically in the United States for any of this at the federal level, so we’re going to have to do a lot of work at the state and local levels to make things happen.

The Mix: So we’re talking about solar plus storage more often than not?

McKibben: And in fact, the way that’s exploding is just incredible. California tested their virtual power plant systems, they had 100,000 home batteries hooked together, and it was providing as much power as a small nuclear reactor in the evening. And just a powerful reminder of how things are going to change. In the U.S., if we converted our whole fleet to electric vehicles, that’d be enough battery power to run the entire United States for two days on nothing but the power stored in those batteries.

The world’s going to be very different as we make this leap, and you can see it happening already in China, which really is the first electro-state we’ve had. We’ve had plenty of petro-states… but if nobody in China is going to be driving a car that needs gasoline, it’s not clear to me or really to any rational planner where all that oil is going to go.

The Mix: Especially because as the United States abandons its international partnerships, its international relationships, China is more than happy to step up. And one aspect of that is they will not be stepping up with internal combustion vehicles.

McKibben: That’s absolutely right. And if you’re at the moment dependent on the U.S. for, say, liquefied natural gas, you’d think you’d be working as hard and as quickly as you possibly could to end that dependence so that Donald Trump doesn’t have that hanging over you….

The revelation that the sun and the wind are omnipresent is going to change geopolitics in big ways. Even human beings are going to struggle to figure out a way to fight a war over sunshine, I think.

The Mix: So you’re saying that Sun Day activities are to be focused largely on local dimensions of getting this done, whether it’s permitting, whether it’s local buy-in. How can Canadians get involved with this year’s program, if we can figure out a way to align with our allies in the United States while still keeping #ElbowsUp to our common adversaries?

McKibben: Don’t let your guard down for a minute! We’ve been doing lots of fun stuff. Th!rd Act, which I founded, organizes old people like me for action on climate, and on Canada Day we went to a bunch of consulates and had choirs out to sing O Canada. Just to let people know that most of us are not onboard with our insane leader.

The Mix: And most of us know that, I think I can say.

McKibben: But, yeah, SunDay.earth is a beautiful website. One of the things people are doing is drawing images of our logo of the sun. There are 10,000 or more now in our global gallery, and that beauty is actually a part of this change that’s happening here, because the sun is beautiful. That deep, human connection to the sun is one of the tools, along with economics and engineering and climate science and the things we need to leverage to make these changes. There are two hemispheres of our brain, and the other one responds much more viscerally to beautiful images that speak to aspiration and harmony.

The Mix: There’s a risk that the technologies that we need to get this done will create new hazards, that there’s the possibility that they’ll create new sacrifice zones. How do we make this a shift that really leaves no one else behind? And can you suggest anywhere where you see that working well?

McKibben: We do our best to [protect] the places where we’re going to have to mine for lithium and cobalt and copper. There’s signs that it’s getting a little better in some of those places. but it’s never going to be perfect.

The advantage is that you need to mine a lot less than you did before. And if you think about it for a minute, the reason is intuitive. You get yourself some lithium and you stick it in a battery and it does its job for 25 years. And if the battery degrades, then the lithium is valuable enough that it’s already being recycled and put to work in the next battery.

If you go mine yourself some coal, you set it on fire and you have to go mine some more tomorrow. So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimated in the fall that the total volume of minerals between now and 2050 would be roughly equivalent to how much coal we mined on this planet last year. There’s no free lunch, but there are cheaper lunches and more expensive ones.

The Mix: You’ll hear people in our generation lamenting that we’re passing all of these problems along to our youngers and our betters, but it’s usually from the perspective that our time has passed, when many of us boomers and post boomers are at the height of our resources and influence. And some of us do still have time and good health that we can bring to the fight. Even if it means mobilizing every rocking chair in and around Washington, DC to get it done. When people our age give up, is it a well-meaning cop-out or just a cop-out?

McKibben: I think it’s a cop-out, and I think people know better. That’s why we’ve had such incredible organizing success…

If you’re in your Third Act now, it means that your first act was in this period of intense social, cultural, political transformation in the 1960s and 1970s. And people have memory, muscle memory of that time.

We may have put it aside as a generation for a while and concentrated a little more on consumerism than citizenship for a few decades. But that’s water under the bridge, and people now are very willing to try and make up for lost time. It’s beautiful to watch. It’s great fun.

…I’ve spent much of my life organizing youth, which is great, but people don’t stay young very long. [But] if you’re 62, statistically speaking, you’ve got a good quarter-century left to cause trouble. So it’s really fun to get people organized and pushing hard.

The Mix: Okay. So we have our mandate. Thank you. One other question for you: How do we get the message to investors who are motivated by financial returns, not climate, and who may not be interested in sweating the details on climate impacts as long as they have what they consider a balanced portfolio.

McKibben: Actually, there’ve been a series of numbers in the last week showing that banks are suddenly doing considerably less financing of fossil fuel. We’ve been pushing very hard on this for years, at Th!rd Act and elsewhere, and I think that’s playing some role. But I think the main role is that anybody who can read a spreadsheet can look and see that the future is bleak for fossil fuel.

I mean, you have a dirty technology that costs more, considerably more than its rivals sun power, wind power, battery power. The only way the fossil fuel industry can keep going is with political influence buying. So that’s what they’re busy trying to do…Alberta is busy throwing fits of various kinds to try and terrorize Ottawa into doing what they want.

But the money guys are starting to figure out that you don’t want to make any long-term investments in this stuff because they’re not likely to end well. And if there’s money to be lent, there’s demand for this in renewable energy. It makes good use of that upfront capital because you have to build the equipment in the first place.

And then after that, it’s free.

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