Talking about climate change can feel hopeless. Even the good news, on the rare occasion we get some, feels hollow.
But for the most part, it’s bad news. The planet keeps heating up. So many of the disasters we were warned about years ago are starting to pile on. Meanwhile, the oil keeps flowing, the politicians keep punting, and the systems meant to save us keep failing.
Now we’re staring down the barrel of another Trump presidency and the potential unraveling of what little climate progress we’ve made. But there’s a twist: Solar and wind are booming, and they’re now the world’s cheapest energy sources. Many cities, towns, and in some cases countries are running almost entirely on renewables. That is all great news.
But what does it actually mean? Is it too late to turn this thing around?
Bill McKibben is one of the most influential voices on the climate over the past four decades. He sounded the alarm in his 1989 book The End of Nature, which many consider a foundational text of the modern environmentalist movement. He’s also founded organizations like Third Act and 350.org, the latter of which remains one of the biggest climate activist groups in the world.
His new book, Here Comes the Sun, is about the revolution in solar and wind power and it might be the most hopeful thing he’s ever written. And that’s because we now have the tools we need to tackle this problem. The question is, do we have the political will to do it?
I invited McKibben onto The Gray Area to talk about that and the many possibilities in front of us. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This book is much more optimistic than I expected. It doesn’t feel forced; it feels like you’re genuinely excited about what’s possible.
It’s an odd moment for me. Much of what I’ve been describing since The End of Nature in the late ’80s is now happening in real time. We’re watching the climate system come apart. Politically, I don’t think I’ve lived through a bleaker period. And yet, at the same time, I have news of one big good thing: a transformation in how we make and use energy that’s actually moving fast enough to matter. So I get to be the bearer of some good news, for once.
You’re clear that we’re past being able to “stop” global warming. So what’s the plausible goal now?
Stopping warming entirely isn’t on the menu. What might still be on the menu is stopping it short of the point where it cuts civilization off at the knees. That’s the goal here. Recent science about the jet stream, the Gulf stream, and the atmosphere’s moisture content is scary. These are enormous systems with momentum. But every tenth of a degree matters. Each tenth we avoid keeps tens or hundreds of millions of people within a livable climate zone. That remains the biggest task humans have ever had: keep the damage within survivable limits.
Right — this isn’t binary. Degrees matter. Fractions of degrees matter.
That’s why the clean energy news is so important. I’ve covered this long enough to feel the ground shifting, and the pace has surprised even people in the climate and energy world. California, which is the fourth-largest economy on Earth, has quietly hit a tipping point. On many days, it supplies more than 100 percent of its power for long stretches from clean energy.
When the sun goes down, batteries that spent the afternoon soaking up surplus sunshine now become the biggest source of electricity. The net result is that California used about 40 percent less natural gas for electricity this summer than two years ago. If that spreads globally, you start shaving tenths of a degree off the future. That’s the best number I’ve heard in almost 40 years of doing this.
We’re talking in mid-August, more than six months into President Donald Trump’s second term. He ran promising to “drill, baby, drill” and to kneecap electric vehicles. Has he delivered?
He’s doing extraordinary damage and he’s doing it with the spineless support of a lot of Republicans who know better.
I’ll make two points. First, this is a global crisis and a global energy market. What Trump is really doing — and this should make any American furious — is ceding the energy future to China, often for technologies that were developed here. We invented the solar cell and the lithium-ion battery. Now we’re practically handing the future to Beijing on a platter. In the long run, that might still be good for the planet because they’re pushing these technologies everywhere, but it’s a staggering abdication by the US.
Second, even here at home, the story isn’t finished. The most interesting state in America for energy right now is Texas. It’s installing renewables faster than California. In the spring, fossil fuel interests tried to ram through a “DEI for gas” bill, which is basically forcing one unit of gas buildout for every unit of solar. People in rural Texas came out of the woodwork to say, Don’t do this. Wind and solar keep schools open, fund elder care. These are real, tangible benefits. The legislature backed down. So even in red states, the economics and the local benefits are changing the politics.
And one reason I’m optimistic is that a lot of this is now mundane economics. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. This is no longer the Whole Foods of energy — nice but pricey. It’s the Costco of energy: cheap, abundant, on the shelf, ready to go.
The federal picture is obviously grim. The EPA under Trump revoked a long-held scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger health and welfare, which is the legal basis for a lot of climate regulation. Is this as bad as it looks? Do you think the courts will stop it?
It will be challenged. We’ll see what happens. But it’s an “up is down” administration. They insist DC is a crime-ridden hellscape when the data say otherwise, and they insist climate’s no big deal as entire neighborhoods burn, as Texas floods, as wildfire smoke becomes a seasonal feature in the East, and as we log the hottest months in recorded history. But physics doesn’t care about press releases. The danger is the damage they can do in the meantime. So we can’t just rely on the superior economics of solar, wind, and batteries. We also need activism to change laws and minds. There’s a lot that states and cities can do — even with Washington hostile.
Give me a concrete example.
Rooftop solar in the US costs roughly three times as much, and takes far longer, than in many other countries. In Australia, you can call on Monday and have panels up by Friday; 40 percent of homes there have rooftop solar. The difference isn’t the price of panels; it’s our baroque, Byzantine permitting across 15,000 municipalities. We’re treating a safe, standardized appliance like it’s a bespoke construction project. The National Renewable Energy Lab built an instant-permitting tool — SolarAPP+ — and states like California, Maryland, and New Jersey have adopted it. We should scale that everywhere.
Another example is “balcony solar.” In the past two years, millions of Europeans — apartment-dwellers! — have bought a plug-in panel that hangs off the balcony and instantly supplies around 20 percent of a home’s power. That’s illegal across the US, except in Utah, where a libertarian state senator asked the obvious question: Why can Hamburg do it but Provo can’t? The law changed unanimously. Now you can find people in Utah happily plugging in balcony panels and watching the meter spin backward.
Why did so many people — including environmentalists — so badly underestimate how fast solar and wind would scale?
For decades, fossil energy was cheap and renewable energy was expensive. That got lodged in our heads. Even climate advocates focused on things like carbon taxes to raise fossil prices so renewables could compete. But about four or five years ago we crossed an invisible line and people didn’t update. Today, it’s often twice as cheap to make power from sun as from fire.
If you want a date, I’d circle June 2023. That’s when global temperatures began their latest spike. Some of the hottest months in at least 125,000 years, and it’s also the month humanity started installing a gigawatt of solar every day. Since then the pace has only accelerated. In April, China alone was installing around 3 gigawatts per day, which is the equivalent of a coal plant’s capacity every eight hours.
In your book, you note that in 2022, China spent 26 times as much on the clean energy supply chain as Europe and the US combined. The Inflation Reduction Act was starting to narrow that gap. With Trump back, how dramatically will that change? Will we get anywhere close to that expected number or will China just continue to lap us?
They’ll lap us. The IRA was our best chance to catch up; parts may survive, but a lot won’t. Twenty years from now, the US may be a kind of theme park where tourists come to see how people used to make energy by setting things on fire. Eventually, we’ll try to catch up, but we won’t be owning that future anymore.
I wanted to ask about movement politics since you’ve been so involved for so long. For decades, climate politics was about stopping bad things — pipelines, leases, drilling. But the economics have flipped. The movement now has to be about building. What does that shift look like?
I’ve been writing for a year that people like me — old white guys — should stop reflexively suing to block projects we don’t like. It’s absurd to block solar farms because you don’t like looking at them. The imperative is to make it easier to build the clean stuff. That’s why we’re focused on permitting reform at the local and state level.
Washington is a write-off for the moment; rational thought has left the building. But states — red and blue — can move. Texas and Utah show it. And the appeal is broad. If you’re a “my home is my castle” American, solar makes that literally truer; if you love the idea of a network powered by something elegant and natural, you’re on board for different reasons. Small versus big is the fault line — not left versus right.
Why did this become a red-blue cultural fight when it really doesn’t have to be?
The fossil fuel industry spent decades and billions making it partisan. The Koch network effectively bought one of our political parties. Fifty years ago, environmentalism was bipartisan. [Republican President Richard] Nixon signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and created the EPA under pressure from the first Earth Day. The science has been clear since the ’80s, and the oil companies knew. They treated it as a threat to their business model, not to the planet, and were willing to wreck our democracy as well as our atmosphere to defend it. The wild card is that we’ve now introduced the cheapest, most beautiful form of energy into this mix and that changes the politics.
“Beautiful” isn’t a word people associate with utility-scale power — but you lean into it.
It matters! The sun already gives us light, warmth, and photosynthesis. Now it can power everything else. People respond to that. The Vatican just announced it’s building a solar farm outside Rome that will make the Vatican the first fully solar-powered nation. That’s not just a tech story; it’s a civilizational story. Big Oil is still powerful, but a lot of what they’re pushing — like leaning on countries to lock themselves into US liquefied natural gas — may backfire. If you’re Indonesia or Vietnam, do you really want to tie your future energy supply to a fickle superpower? Or do you want to harvest the sun and wind that fall on your own land and sea?
There’s a perverse wrinkle here: Sun and wind are so cheap they don’t fit neatly into a profit model built on scarcity.
It’s an investment problem for some incumbents. Returns aren’t as juicy as selling fuel forever. But for countries, cheap power is a competitive advantage. If you can run your industries on electricity, your economy hums. That’s what China is aiming at. Meanwhile, if the US insists on expensive options — coal, gas, or boutique nuclear — we handicap ourselves.
You also make the blunt point that breaking the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a big deal if we do want a more humane politics. What’s the argument there?
It’s liberating in multiple senses. Cut emissions or the planet fries — that’s incentive enough. But we also save lives. About 9 million people die each year from air pollution tied to fossil combustion. We prevent childhood asthma. We reduce the leverage of petro-authoritarians. And we unlock a wave of useful appliances: heat pumps that use a little electricity to move latent heat in the air and keep homes comfortable year-round; EVs and e-bikes that make cities quieter and cleaner.
You really believe there’s hope?
I have hope that it’s worth the try. I can’t think of a better way to spend a life than working on the gravest problem our species has stumbled into.
On page one you say there’s still a path forward. When is that path foreclosed? How much warming is too much?
Honestly, we don’t know. We’ve never run this experiment with people watching. The last five times the atmosphere filled with carbon — because of massive volcanic eruptions — there were mass extinctions. We’re adding carbon faster now than in those episodes. But unlike volcanoes, our “eruptions” are cars, factories, and power plants we could shut down quickly if we chose. It may be that we’ve already waited too long. The momentum in polar melt and the knock-on effects on jet and Gulf streams are frightening. I’m not a Pollyanna. My first book was called The End of Nature. But for the first time, we have a scalable response. So we should try like hell and hope the Hollywood ending works at least a little.
Paint the bleak alternative plainly. If we don’t get this right, what’s the world like in 10, 50, 100 years?
If it’s not hell, it’s close in temperature. Smokier. Harder to grow food. Biology in shock. Extinctions accelerating. At 3 degrees Celsius, the UN estimates 1 to 3 billion climate refugees. That would mean up to a quarter of humanity forced to move. A couple of million people at our southern border nearly broke American politics; now multiply by a thousand. That’s why every tenth of a degree we avoid is the most important political work humans have ever undertaken.
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