Bill McKibben Says Solar Power Is The Path To The Future – CleanTechnica

---

---

Bill McKibben is an indefatigable climate advocate. He is not a scientist, but he founded the climate advocacy group 350.org, whose name is taken from the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when the industrial revolution began. After a hurricane ripped through his home state of Vermont, leaving massive destruction from flooding, he wrote Oil and Honey, one of the first books to draw a bright line between burning fossil fuels and global heating.

McKibben is also the founder of Third Act, an organization for people over 60 that allows them to come together to promote political actions designed to preserver the Earth as a place where humans can continue to thrive. For his troubles, he has been doxxed, harassed, and arrested on multiple occasions. And yet he persists. On August 19, 2025, his latest book — Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization — will be published.

An excerpt of that book appears in the latest issue of The New Yorker. What follows is a condensation of that excerpt, one that highlights the primary themes of the book. McKibben begins by saying, “In the past two years … with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world. Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this is a very big and hopeful thing.”

“It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next,” McKibben writes. “That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history. In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the US.” He then gave a shoutout to CleanTechnica, which put a smile on a lot of faces around here.

He points out that renewable energy is surging in China — which installs a gigawatt of capacity every 8 minutes — and throughout Asia, Europe, and South America. Things may have turned bleak for renewables in the US, but the trend worldwide is strongly up and has now reached the point of being unstoppable, even by small minded tyrants who fear the loss of revenue if their business model gets disrupted. “Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world,” McKibben says.

Everything Begins With Sunlight

The source of all life on Earth is the sun. Each day, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to power the needs of all 8+ billion humans 10,000 times over, according to MIT News. All we have to do is harvest it and ensure that everyone has equal access to it. Coal, methane, and oil are nothing more than stored sunshine trapped by quadrillions of living organisms over a millions of years.

Releasing all that stored energy over a relatively short period of time — centuries are merely the blink of an eye in geological terms — overloads the environment with waste products, forcing the entire system out of balance. Think of it like a swimming pool. As long as the amount of water coming in is equal to the amount going out due to evaporation, everything is fine. But suddenly the fire department shows up and starts adding water from a fire hose to the pool. Now the whole system is out of balance and things begin to deteriorate as a result.

Renewable energy, whether from sunshine or from wind, allows us to shut off that fire hose and get the Earth’s natural rhythms back in balance so we can all enjoy life on our little blue lifeboat on the far edge of a minor galaxy. If we blow this chance, no one will come to save us and no one will notice — or care — when we are gone.  So why are we getting so much resistance from behind?

Bill McKibben — Clean Energy Optimist

McKibben suggests, “the sheer scope of that potential change seems to be motivating much of the current backlash against clean energy in the US…. An analysis from the Rhodium Group think tank found that by 2035 the [One Big Beautiful Bill] may have eliminated as much as seventy two per cent of all the clean electricity that would have been produced in the US under the current law. But, in a way, even this backlash is a backhanded recognition of the moment; the Administration, and its supporters in the fossil-fuel industry, clearly consider this the last possible moment to stifle the sun.”

What changed? “If you want to assign a precise moment when the results of that new economic reality became manifest, consider June, 2023. That month was when scientists reported that the earth’s temperature had suddenly begun not just to climb but to spike — the days around the solstice were the hottest ever measured, setting off a run of record-smashing heat that continues to this day. But June, 2023, also seems to be the month when people started putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels every day,” McKibben writes.

He cites a report by RMI in 2024 which explains why burning fossil fuels to make energy makes no sense because it is incredibly inefficient. It explains that, “Burning gas to light a room creates more heat than light. Burning coal to create electricity creates more heat than electricity. Burning oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than motion. We are sending more energy up smokestacks and out exhaust pipes than we are putting to work to power our economy.”

Next, McKibben quotes Rob Carlson, an energy investor, who says continuing to burn fossil fuels is a “self-imposed financial penalty” which will “ultimately degrade the country’s long-term global competitiveness. The same calculation applies to any nation, or any polity of any size, that chooses to continue burning fossil fuels in any application in which electricity could instead be provided more competitively with renewables.”

One reason we missed some of that revolution is that so much of it is taking place in China. He notes that, according to Bloomberg’s David Fickling, seven Chinese companies most Americans have never heard of — Tongwei, GCL Technology Holdings, Xinte Energy, Longi, Trina Solar, JA Solar Technology, and JinkoSolar — produced more energy in 2024 than the world’s seven largest oil companies. It is true that China has leaned heavily on coal to power its industrialization push, but in 2020, “China set a goal of producing twelve hundred gigawatts of clean power by 2030; it hit that target in early 2024, six years ahead of schedule,” McKibben writes.

Distributed Energy Resources

Renewables make something possible that is largely unheard of in the industrialized West, but is actually the harbinger of a fundamental shift in how electricity is made and distributed. “In Namibia, we’ve uncovered that people have built about seventy megawatts of distributed generation — mostly rooftop solar — that’s the equivalent of about fifteen per cent of the country’s peak demand,” Joel Nana, a Capetown-based energy analyst, told McKibben.

“In Eswatini, which is a very small country, it’s about eleven per cent of peak demand,” he said. In South Africa, the continent’s economic colossus, small-scale solar now provides, by his reckoning, nearly a fifth the capacity of the national grid. “You won’t see these numbers anywhere,” Nana said. “They’re not reported in national plans. No one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities. And, in fact, the numbers could be much higher, because the smallest systems aren’t reporting to anyone, not even the utilities.”

Distributed energy is really the ultimate promise of renewables, where people become prosumers, not just customers of a utility company. Just as cell phones enabled people to leapfrog over telephone landlines, distributed energy can set people free from the rate increases and service charges that are part and parcel of the traditional utility model.

“Solar has become a no-brainer for most businesses, if not all. The prices just make sense,” Nana said. “In a lot of places, it’s all the malls, all the mills — any business that has enough roof space. You have some utilities, like in Mozambique, that see small-scale solar power as a threat and are trying to claw it down. But the realization is this is happening anyway, whether you like it or not. If you fight people, they’ll just go clandestine and install it without letting you know.”

Politics Have Consequences

There are signs that the implacable opposition to renewables by the failed US administration is actually encouraging people in other countries to turbocharge their own renewable energy goals. “Washington’s new fickleness provides one more reason to stop depending on the US for fuel…. One Wall Street analyst predicted this spring, it’s possible that renewables will see yet another acceleration, driven not just by climate worries but by security fears, as nations seek some insulation from ‘geopolitical, macro, and financial risks.’

“A 2023 poll by the market research firm Glocalities, of twenty one thousand respondents in twenty one countries, found that sixty eight per cent favored solar energy, ‘five times more than public support for fossil fuels.’ And surveys conducted by the communications and research firm Global Strategy Group in the fall of 2024 found that eighty seven per cent of Americans — and almost eighty percent of people planning to vote for the [current president]—favored the clean energy tax credits in the I.R.A. ‘Solar power remains the most popular source of electricity in America,  Global Strategy Group partner Andrew Baumann said, ‘with broad support across the political spectrum.’ If we can make the transition affordable and easy, the will is there.” McKibben says.

It is wonderful to find an optimist among all the wreckage of the current administration, but Bill McKibben may be on to something. Stripped of the malarkey and disinformation of the fossil fuel companies, renewables just make sense. The cost of the “fuel” for them — sunlight and wind — is zero. The cost of fossil fuels is staggeringly high. McKibben himself last year claimed that 60 percent of emissions from shipping are attributable to moving fossil fuels from place to place around the globe. Then after it is refined, two thirds of the energy contained in those fuels is wasted as heat.

If you described that process to a group of middle school science students, they would laugh you out of the room. It is so ridiculous, nobody would think twice about it. Pay for something you can get for free? Are you serious? Use an energy source that is 30 percent efficient when you can use one that is 90 percent efficient? Please be serious. Bill McKibben is one of the hardest working climate activists alive today, and one of the most sensible. His new book should be a “must read” for any regular reader of CleanTechnica.