{"id":131440,"date":"2025-08-09T10:05:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T10:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/131440\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T10:05:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T10:05:13","slug":"solar-energy-is-not-just-good-for-the-earth-its-practical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/131440\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar Energy Is Not Just Good For The Earth\u2014It\u2019s Practical"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is an excerpt from Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization<\/a>\u00a0by Bill McKibben.<\/p>\n

When you purchase products through the Bookshop.org link on this page, Science Friday earns a small commission which helps support our journalism.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Here<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBuy The Book<\/p>\n

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometime in the early part of the 2020s we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel. That\u2019s not yet common knowledge\u2014\u00adwe still think of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines as \u201calternative energy,\u201d as if they were the Whole Foods of power, nice but pricey. In fact\u2014\u00adand more so with each passing month\u2014\u00adthey are the Costco of energy, inexpensive and available in bulk. We live on an earth where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun; the second-\u00adcheapest is to let the breeze created by the sun\u2019s heating turn the blade of a wind turbine. Beginning about the middle of 2023, we entered the really steep part of this growth curve that could redefine our future, crossing another invisible line, this one marking the installation of a gigawatt\u2019s worth of solar panels on this planet every day. (A gigawatt is about the output of a typical coal-\u00adfired power plant or nuclear reactor.) By the fall of 2024 that gigawatt was going up every 18 hours. We\u2019re still in the early days of this transformation\u2014\u00adright now only about 15 percent of the planet\u2019s electricity comes from sun and wind, and only about a quarter of the energy we use comes from electricity. But exponential growth changes numbers like that very fast\u2014\u00adin 2024, 92.5 percent of all new electricity bought online around the world came from renewables; in the US the figure was 96 percent. By April 2025, fossil fuel was producing less than half of American electricity, for the first time ever. There\u2019s no longer a technical or financial obstacle in the way; we already have the factory capacity, mostly in China, to produce as many solar panels as the climate scientists say we need. In May 2025 came the news that China had used 5 percent less coal in the first quarter of the year to produce electricity than it had in 2024\u2014\u00addespite a surging economy, Chinese emissions were actually dropping.<\/p>\n

The suddenness of this moment is startling. The solar cell was invented in 1954, and it took from then until 2022 to install the first terawatt worth of solar power on this planet. It took two years to get the second; the third will be quicker still. It\u2019s all brand new.<\/p>\n

But there are a few places that are running far ahead, showing what\u2019s possible. China is well on its way to being the earth\u2019s first \u201celectro-\u00adstate\u201d; something like half of all clean energy has been installed within its borders. And 2024 was a breakout year in California: there were finally enough solar panels that for parts of most days the state could produce from renewable sources more than 100 percent of the electricity it used; at night great batteries that had spent the afternoon soaking up sunshine often became the biggest source of supply to the electric grid of the world\u2019s fifth-\u00adlargest economy. As a result, in 2024 California used 25 percent less natural gas to produce its power than it had in 2023, which is a big number. Through mid-\u00adApril of 2025, as more panels and batteries came online, the numbers got even better: California was using 44 percent less natural gas to make electricity than it had just two years earlier. On the other side of the world, in Pakistan, a flood of cheap solar panels from China let homeowners and storekeepers and factory managers build the equivalent of a third of the country\u2019s electric grid inside of a year. Peasant farmers, often just laying the panels on the ground, started pumping their irrigation water with electricity instead of generators powered with fossil fuels; diesel sales dropped 30 percent in the course of a year.<\/p>\n

Those kind of shifts, replicated quickly in many more places, could take a real bite out of the grim predictions of climate scientists; the sun burns so we don\u2019t need to. We are in a desperate race; those scientists have told us that to stay on anything like a survivable path we must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half before the decade is out. That target is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, and this book is an effort to shove us toward that deadline.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tRelated Segment
\n\t\t\t\tCan The Rise In Solar Power Balance Out Clean Energy Cuts?\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

But I hope that this book is timeless as well\u2014\u00adthat it\u2019s anticipating a shift that will play out over many lifetimes, and in ways that diverge dramatically from our recent history. That\u2019s because energy from the sun is not just cheap. It\u2019s also diffuse, available everywhere instead of concentrated in a few places. And that prefigures a different world with a more localized and more humane geopolitics; indeed, the sun works more reliably toward the equator, which could allow the redress of some of earth\u2019s great inequities. In February 2025 the energy analysts at the Rocky Mountain Institute reported that renewable energy was growing twice as fast in the developing world of the Global South as in the developed world of the Global North. Relying on energy sources that are abundant instead of scarce\u2014\u00adthe sun and the wind each day produce thousands of times as much energy as we could ever use\u2014\u00adcould even reconfigure our ideas of competition and conquest. Unlike oil and gas, sun and wind can\u2019t be hoarded. If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance.<\/p>\n

And for a species that has become almost fatally disconnected from the natural world, the sun offers a way back into a relationship with reality. We were all sun worshippers once; it\u2019s not perhaps too much to imagine that we might someday soon gaze up a little more often, maybe even breaking a little of the enchantment woven by the glowing lights in our palms. This is not, I think, a \u201ctechnofix,\u201d but something far more fundamental. We have the chance to join in a great global project, providing affordable energy to every human community even as we stave off our greatest threat. It could prove a unifying mission for a divided world. The last remotely comparable project was the moon shot of the 1960s, but that involved one nation putting two men on an orbiting rock. This quest involves bringing our star down to earth to make that earth work\u2014\u00adwhat could be more quintessentially human?<\/p>\n

All this hope risks sounding giddy; let my dark realism reassert itself for a moment and offer up some caveats and cautions. I\u2019m not overly concerned about the things people usually point to. As I\u2019ll make clear, we\u2019re not going to run short of minerals to build batteries or land to put panels on. Instead, my worries stem from hard realities both physical and political.<\/p>\n

First, this definitely comes too late to \u201cstop global warming.\u201d We\u2019ve already done fundamental damage to the planet\u2019s physical systems, to the point of altering the jet stream and weakening the Gulf Stream; we\u2019ve already raced past the 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperature that we pledged in Paris to avoid. (In April 2025, the Trump administration fired most of the American scientists who monitor this increase, perhaps reasoning that what we don\u2019t know can\u2019t hurt us.)<\/p>\n

Our best hope now is simply to stop the heating of the earth short of the point where it cuts civilization off at the knees, and even that will be a very close call. I will return to the question of pace over and over in these pages, because it\u2019s what matters most. I have little doubt we will run the world on sun and wind 40 years from now, but if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there then it will be a broken planet; our energy sources will hardly matter. The march of history won\u2019t get us where we need to go fast enough; we need to force that march.<\/p>\n

Second, there\u2019s no guarantee that the momentum of the last few years will continue. The fossil fuel industry has read the numbers too, and so they\u2019ve girded for the fight. As the chairman of one big oil company said in the fall of 2024, the industry thinks we should keep burning gas and oil until \u201cevery last molecule\u201d had been sucked from the earth. If you think that capitalism guarantees we\u2019ll pick the lowest-\u00adpriced option, think again: In certain ways, solar and wind power are almost too cheap for our economy. Investors who have gotten rich controlling the hoarded \u201creserves\u201d of fossil fuel are scared of the fact that the sun delivers energy for free each time it rises above the horizon, and in their fear they\u2019re massively gaming our political system. The worldwide elections of 2024 saw setback after setback, with oil-\u00adsoaked populists winning control in too many places. Just as they played the game of climate denial with real success for three decades, they now engage in a kind of solutions denial, claiming we\u2019re not ready for clean energy, or offering up substitutes closer to the status quo. Some of these substitutes (geothermal power and nuclear energy, if the cost ever comes down) may offer useful side dishes to the main course of sun, wind, and batteries; others (carbon capture from power plants, biofuels) are just expensive efforts to extend the business model of this industry a little longer. All of the substitutes are effective at distracting us, especially in the distorted infosphere of greenwash and spin we inhabit.<\/p>\n

Nowhere, of course, is that distortion more powerful than the United States, where Trump rode back into office vowing to \u201cdrill, baby, drill\u201d and to crash the electric vehicle (EV) industry. He\u2019d been in office four hours when he signed an order ending all federal support for wind power. (As for solar energy, the week before the election he said, \u201cIt\u2019s all steel and glass and wires. It looks like hell. And you see rabbits get caught in it.\u201d) By April, just three months into his second term, Trump was announcing plans to revive the coal industry, and his bizarre tariffs were making life harder for renewable energy developers; he cut off funding to Princeton\u2019s climate modelers on the grounds that their findings were causing \u201cclimate anxiety.\u201d All of which is to offer a third caution: Just because the world goes in one direction, that doesn\u2019t mean every nation will follow. Yes, there\u2019s enormous momentum behind this transformation; on the last day of February 2025 the federal Energy Information Administration predicted that 93 percent of American electric generation built in Trump\u2019s first year would be carbon-\u00adfree, mostly from solar. In the first month of 2025, as Trump was taking office, sun and wind combined made up 98 percent of new generating capacity in the States. But clearly the Trump\/Musk team will try to break that momentum; already-\u00adhigh tariffs on Chinese solar panels are being increased again even as I finish this manuscript, and the administration is embarked on a sprawling effort to achieve \u201cenergy dominance\u201d based on oil and gas. It\u2019s an effort to stuff the solar genie back in the barrel, and we don\u2019t know yet to what degree it will succeed. The Biden administration, with the Inflation Reduction Act, set in motion transformative spending on clean energy technology, and spread the money carefully around the red states; Texas, home base of the hydrocarbon industry, is now outpacing even California in clean energy (though the state legislature, as of spring 2025, was engaged in an all-out effort to sabotage that growth). Power from the sun can appeal to conservatives (\u201cmy home is my well-\u00adwired castle\u201d) as powerfully as it does to liberals. But the addiction to fossil fuels and all its accomplices (the giant SUV, say) runs deeper here than anyplace else; it will be a fight to turn the American page.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m ready for that fight. Even as I write these pages, I\u2019m helping organize what we\u2019re calling Sun Day, set for the autumnal equinox in September 2025. Indeed, some of the proceeds from this book are supporting that organizing process, because its goal is the same: to help people understand the possibility of our moment. As we shall see, much of the progress that engineers have made has come on the back of inspired activism, something we need more of. In this fight, the solar panel and the wind turbine are both the crucial machines and also the symbols of potential liberation.<\/p>\n

And in true Hollywood fashion, our liberation and our destruction are arriving at precisely the same time, offering us a remarkable choice. Everything is going wrong, except this one big thing. Our species, at what feels like a very dark moment, can take a giant leap into the light. Of the sun.<\/p>\n

\t\tMeet the Writer<\/p>\n

Bill McKibben<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAbout Bill McKibben<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill McKibben is a climate activist and founder of Third Act. He\u2019s based in Middlebury, Vermont.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The following is an excerpt from Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":131441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[746,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-131440","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114998249116076513","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}