A groundbreaking climate author sees hope in the Sun

In 1989, Bill McKibben wrote the first mainstream warning about climate change. Considered the preeminent climate change journalist in the country, McKibben has written often about the dangers ahead, but his new book heralds solar power as the light in the darkness of the Trump era. 

Bill McKibben tried to warn us. 

In 1989, McKibben, then a young writer at the New Yorker, wrote about the dangers of climate change and the path carbon emissions had shoved the world onto.

Climate change, McKibben wrote then, threatens cities, crops, and rural communities, but it also destroys our “comforting sense … of the permanence of our natural world.” 

As hurricanes, fires, and floods become bigger, and 100-year storms strike every year, reality would one day intrude on “human ideas about the world and our place in it,” he wrote.

“The death of these ideas begins with concrete changes in the reality around us, changes that scientists can measure. More and more frequently, these changes will clash with our perceptions, until our sense of nature as eternal and separate is finally washed away and we see all too clearly what we have done,” McKibben wrote.

McKibben was writing about us. He was writing about now. Considered the preeminent climate change journalist in the country, McKibben has countless stark, sober, but engaging articles and books about the dangers ahead.

But even with the Trump administration’s open climate denial and warfare against climate change policies,  McKibben has not given up hope. 

His new book, “Here Comes the Sun,” heralds the promise of solar power, finding light amid the darkness of President Donald Trump’s climate policies and the rapidly ticking clock. 

He is also one of the organizers of Sun Day, a day of advocacy, protests, and rallies across the country on Sept. 21 intended to highlight the urgency of renewable energy sources. 

“Here Comes the Sun” comes out on Aug. 19.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Cardinal & Pine: Do you think those perceptions you wrote three decades ago are finally changing? Can we clearly see what we’ve done?

Bill McKibben: I wish more than anything that I had been wrong. It’s abundantly clear to anyone with eyes and an open mind that we’re now in a dramatically dangerous time in Earth’s history. We have really screwed things up and I think most people have at some level recognized that. 

But we’re in an ironic moment: It’s scary enough that a lot of people have tried to suppress that recognition, and they’ve been easy prey for the fossil fuel industry and their friends in the Trump administration who desperately want them to suppress it. Because they know that if we really reckoned with the crisis we were in, we’d have no choice but to go very quickly away from coal and gas and oil.

Cardinal & Pine: What has been your response to President Trump’s moves to dismantle existing climate protections?

McKibben: The Trump administration is ham handed. They’ve been issuing new climate assessments with obscure right wing science, denial, fringe figures, and so on. I’ve always thought that in some ways climate change was a test of whether human beings’ big brain was good at adaptation or not.

It can get us in a lot of trouble. Can it get us out of that trouble? I’ve always sort of suspected that the real answer to that had more to do with the size of the heart that the brain was attached to. Trumpism is a sign that our hearts are not as big as one would hope. But I don’t think the final verdict’s been written yet.

Cardinal & Pine: Which brings me to your new book, “Here Comes the Sun.” In it, you call solar power “a last chance for the climate.” So even after you’ve written over the years about the dangers of climate change and the real time evidence of those dangers, there’s still a chance to get things right?

McKibben: 

This book is a little odd for me because we’re in a period of myriad bad things happening all at once. I am too aware of that. But amid all the big bad things that are happening, there’s one big good thing. We’re used to thinking of solar power as the Whole Foods of energy: Nice but pricey. It’s really the Costco of energy: It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk. It’s on the shelf ready to go.

Even without the federal tax credits and things, the basic financial argument around clean energy remains strong.

That’s why we’re working so hard on things like Sun Day to try and offer a real counter, and to get people to understand not just the necessity, not just the practicality, but also the beauty of the transition that we could now be making.

Cardinal & Pine: In The New York Times, you wrote that the transition was inevitable even with the Trump administration’s moves to stop it.

McKibben: I don’t know how much they can slow it down. I mean, at the moment, Texas is the fastest growing example of renewable energy and batteries. California right now is using 40% less natural gas to generate electricity than they did two years ago. That’s the fourth largest economy in the world. Wall Street is increasingly shorting oil stocks and going long on renewables, just because the logic is so profound.

This is really the thing that just sort of kills me. These are “Made in America” inventions: The solar cell was made in America; the lithium ion battery was made in America. Now, we’re not just letting China eat our lunch, we’re sending a team of red-capped waiters to cater that lunch for China.

I think 40 years from now, the US and every place else will run on sun and wind because it’s as close to free as we’re ever gonna get. Eventually economics will do its thing. But “eventually” doesn’t do us much good in the climate crisis. We’re now seeing degradation and destruction very much in real time and very much accelerating.

Cardinal & Pine: The Town of Carrboro recently sued Duke Energy, one of the country’s largest emitters of greenhouse gasses, accusing it of lying about the risks of burning fossil fuels and deliberately slow rolling the transition to clean energy. Can you talk about Trump and the oil industry’s resistance to solar and wind?

McKibben: Look, they’re realists. They know they’re not going to hold off sun and wind forever. If we can provide the same product at half the price, eventually it’s going to win out. But they’ll settle for holding it off for a decade or two. That wouldn’t be the end of the world if it weren’t for the end of the world; if it wasn’t overlapping with the exact decades we absolutely have to do something about the climate crisis.

The reaction of the oil industry and the Trump administration is proof in its way of just how powerful this technology is.

Cardinal & Pine: The EPA has terminated $156 million in grants intended to expand solar power to rural and low income communities in North Carolina. Solar energy is cheaper month to month than oil and gas, but it is expensive to install, putting it out of reach for many folks without assistance. Assistance the Biden administration provided and the Trump administration is taking away. So what can be done at the local level now?

McKibben:  A few things. One is to try very hard to ease the permitting for all this stuff.  It costs three times as much to put a solar panel on your roof in this country as it does in Australia or the EU, and that’s mostly down to the fact that we have this byzantine permitting system. Every jurisdiction has its own set of rules. They all send inspectors out over and over again, on and on, which is absurd.

This should be as easy as putting a new refrigerator in your house.

I also founded a group called “Third Act,” for old people like me.  We’ve trained up lots and lots of people who know how to deal with the state public utility commissions, the kinds of systems that for decades have been protected in part by their own boringness.  It turns out this is a good task for 70 year olds who have a  basket full of knitting or a crossword puzzle to be able to sit there all day on a weekday and keep an eye on what’s going on as the lobbyists do their thing.

We have a good chapter in North Carolina. It makes a difference. 

Cardinal & Pine: Tell me about Sun Day on Sept. 21. 

McKibben: All across the country, hundreds and hundreds of places, people will be doing all kinds of things. Some places, there will be angry protests against gas pipelines that we really shouldn’t be building because we could do solar instead. Most places will have solar powered concerts, big bike rides, people opening their homes to show their heat pumps to their neighbors on a systematic basis, you know, on and on and on. And if we can get these messages across, then we’ll have something to rally around, not just rally against.

The point is to drive home the idea that renewable is no longer alternative energy. Look, we’re not gonna change the political landscape at all until the midterm elections, until we get new people in Washington.

But we need to start building that fight and we need to do as much as we can at the state and local level in the meantime. 

Cardinal & Pine: You’ve written that folks have to push back against their despair and weariness over the climate crisis. What do you do to push back against your own?

McKibben: I get out in the natural world as much as I can. I live in the woods for that reason. And to remind myself that it’s still a beautiful planet, even as we try to break it so systematically. 

My sense, especially with talking to young people, is yes, they have a lot of climate despair and anxiety. But to them it’s less about the science of climate change than about feeling like they’ve been abandoned to figure it out themselves.

One of the reasons we started “Third Act” is because I’ve met too many people my age who looked at Greta Thunberg and said, “Oh good, this is a problem for the next generation to solve.”  Which is immoral. 

But it’s also impractical. Greta Thunberg may be Prime Minister of Sweden someday, but it’s not gonna be tomorrow, you know?

If you’ve reached the age where you have hair coming out your ears, you have structural power coming out your ears too. We have lots of resources, lots of connections, a lifetime worth of skills, and we punch above our weight politically because we all vote. We’re gonna keep doing it to back up the young people who are trying to make change here. 

I don’t have perfect hope that we’re gonna get there, but we need to try. And my faith is in the idea that Americans are resourceful, “can do,”  independent people who will welcome the freedom that comes with not having to write a check to Saudi Arabia or Houston every month for the rest of their lives to get a product that falls daily on the Tar Heel State.

You know, here in Vermont we spend $2 billion a year buying fossil fuel. I’d rather spend that money on cheddar cheese and maple syrup.