McKibben is not one to sugarcoat this. His first book, 1989’s The End of Nature, appeared one year after Hansen’s testimony, inaugurating a career dedicated to reporting the Holocene’s careen into the Anthropocene. After 36 years, millions of words, and several protest-related misdemeanor arrests, he is climate journalism’s elder statesman, sainted to some, whose books serve as temperature checks, strategy documents, and sources of movement funding. Here Comes the Sun, his new survey and defense of solar energy and its scaling potential, fits this mold; McKibben used part of the advance to support an upcoming national day of action called “Sun Day.” The book begins with an acknowledgment of his long-held apprehension that the window for meaningful action may be closed. After decades of covering the science and politics of climate change, he describes the sorry state of things as “the summation and the vindication of all that angst.”
Neither the sunlit path of a renewable “transition” nor McKibben’s advocacy are new, of course. He has been staking his name and reputation on this transition for the better part of two decades. What’s new is the mix of aggressive offense, scrappy defense, and oversize confidence he brings to it. Here Comes the Sun is the most programmatic of McKibben’s more than 20 books, a collection of good-news headlines and data points arranged to bolster faith in the supposition that we can solarize electricity and electrify the global economy, all without reducing global energy demand, in time to attain net-zero emissions by 2050. Every prong of this remains controversial, including across the broad spectrum of those who support phasing out fossil fuels and building out renewable energy with all deliberate speed. But McKibben treats these matters as all but settled, and he punctuates his lawyerly pitch to the general reader with gavel-rapping requests for order in the climate movement court.
Under this pragmatic directive, questions about the size and purpose of the machine are distractions, intellectual luxuries we cannot afford. Bothering ourselves with evidence that climate change is the symptomatic fever of a larger ecological crisis—driven by centuries of growing resource demands and pollution that now exceed the biosphere’s capacity for renewal—will only “divert us from the work we must quickly do.”
In telling the story of solar’s global spread, McKibben leans heavily on energy reporting by Bloomberg and The Economist, as well as reports published by renewable advocacy and research organizations, notably the Rocky Mountain Institute. Many of the headline milestones achieved in recent years are indeed remarkable, arriving ahead of most estimates. In July 2023, the world began installing a gigawatt of solar panels every day—roughly the same output as a coal or nuclear plant. A year later, developed nations were installing a gigawatt of solar electricity every 18 hours, using panels four times more efficient than those developed in the 1950s. In the United States, more than 80 percent of new electric generation in 2025 is expected to come from renewables, mostly from solar.
An increasing share of cheap Chinese solar panels are purchased by the global south, where renewable energy is growing two times faster than the global north. In Pakistan, McKibben reports, solar is producing a third as much energy as the dirty national grid and is beginning to replace the diesel generators long used in irrigating agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proliferation of micro-solar and community grids is even more dramatic and transformative. McKibben cites a Malawian energy researcher who estimates solarizing the entire continent could be done for $90 billion.
Sweeping statements like these are delivered with bracing confidence throughout Here Comes the Sun. Nothing would be nicer than to believe them. Unfortunately, the global energy picture is a lot foggier, and the light of dawn almost certainly more distant, than this book’s bright melodies would lull us to believe.
This fact does not lessen the need to promote renewables and reject fossil fuels. But it does indicate that the central premise and promise of McKibben’s maximalist renewable program—that renewables can achieve net-zero without any contraction of economic activity and reduction of global energy demand—are delusional. Instead of frankly acknowledging the quixotic nature of his trumpeted agenda, McKibben sometimes writes as if he inhabits another world, where the coast is totally clear. In one bizarre instance, he writes that he visited Mark Jacobson, a Stanford engineer and controversially Panglossian renewable transition theorist, because he “just wanted to hear him gloat.”
McKibben’s answers are drawn from the playbook of eco-modernism, a philosophy that argues we can innovate our way to a green and sustainable version of the growth-based consumer paradigm, in which resource use is “decoupled” from ever-expansionary economic activity. Citing researchers associated with eco-modernist think tanks like the Breakthrough Institute, he proffers evidence that we can electrify everything with renewable energy, at full gallop, without addressing rising demand or its causes. In chorus with the eco-modernists, he assures us that we will soon be able to keep everything humming with highly efficient, recyclable batteries that employ novel chemistries. Though these remain speculative, there is encouraging research into new-generation batteries that replace lithium with sodium and do not require minerals such as cobalt, 70 percent of which is produced under a brutish throwback model of the colonialist exploitation in the Congo, an environmental and social catastrophe that investigative journalist Siddharth Kara memorably exposes in 2023’s Cobalt Red.
We can also, theoretically, create wormhole shortcuts through space-time. But that doesn’t mean we can actually do it, never mind by 2050. Even those forms of electrification within reach will require an unprecedented build-out of grids and lithium-ion batteries, currently the most efficient way to store and transport renewable electricity. These batteries will, in turn, require excavating millions of tons of heavy metals, notably nickel, copper, and, not least, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo. While expressing “no small sympathy for those who groan at the [prospect of] yet more mining,” he defends the renewables mining scramble by calling climate displacement “the greatest colonizing scheme of all time”:
McKibben also may bend too far in his assurances that we “have the stuff” necessary to build the panels, grid infrastructure, and batteries required by the renewable program. “We may be a little short of tellurium, but I predict we’ll find it,” he writes. He quotes a 2023 study—whose lead author, Seaver Wang, directs the Climate and Energy program at the Breakthrough Institute—purporting to show that the crucial minerals needed for net-zero “do not exceed geological reserves,” but omits countervailing research, such as a 2024 Cornell-University of Michigan study that found just one of those crucial minerals—copper—cannot be mined fast enough to electrify the United States, never mind the planet.
What to make, then, of his pivot to selling full electrification of the expansionary economy as the only credible path to net-zero? McKibben addresses the evolution of his stance in two ways. The first is to suggest his adopted eco-modernist politics are really a Trojan horse for a more radical transformation. “Conversion,” he writes, “is the most subversive possible step toward a more localized and modest world…. For a species that has become almost fatally disconnected from the natural world, the sun offers a way back into a relationship with reality.” Elsewhere he claims agreement with Andrew Nikiforuk, a degrowth-oriented Canadian energy writer and critic of eco-modernism, who has written that “responsible green energy advocates” must also advocate for localized economies and banning the “decadent waste” of materials and energy. “Those are mostly things I’ve worked on,” says McKibben. “But they’re hard…. Hopefully a clean energy transition will buy us some time to do these things.”
“This is an emergency, and it can’t be solved by wishful thinking,” he writes, likening his intervention to an emergency room doctor, who doesn’t “waste a lot of time worrying about their patients’ poor lifestyle choices. They do what they must to save their lives, perhaps with the hope that given a second chance their patients will choose more wisely.”
In a closing chapter called “A Subtly New World,” McKibben describes the society we might inhabit once we’re out of the climate ER. This solar-powered world looks very much like our own, with a twist of New England communitarian garnish. “We just need to be a tiny bit less individualistic, just bend a bit in the direction of community,” he writes. “The battery on my Kia can cool my neighbor’s beer before the Red Sox game.” McKibben lightly jabs journalist Matt Yglesias for his climate sanguinity, but his eco-modernist electrification agenda fits on the family tree of “abundance liberalism,” the latest iteration of the idea we can zone, unleash, and grow our way out of a collapsing planet on fire. Activists have a supporting role in McKibben’s schema, but it’s largely a matter of technological innovation and industrial know-how. “Renewable energy relies less on resources than it does on brainpower,” writes McKibben, but the kind of brainpower that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can love.
The irony of McKibben’s eco-modernist stridency in favor of the renewable agenda is that promoting solar does not require abandoning energy realism or the related degrowth politics that he once embraced. One can advocate for building renewable infrastructure and rejecting fossil fuels while also engaging in hard conversations about the larger problem of overshoot and the obvious limits of electrification. There is no conflict here. Fighting fossil fuels, advocating for renewables, and using one’s influence to force an honest reckoning with the nature, causes, and consequences of our crisis—together these amount to an emergency treatment that serves us well. It is not a mystery why people would choose to release themselves to the fantasy of a solar-powered status quo. What’s baffling is McKibben’s decision to join them.
Hence then, the article about bill mckibben s far too sunny outlook for solar power was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Bill McKibben’s Far-Too-Sunny Outlook for Solar Power )
Also on site :