Bill McKibben’s book, Here Comes the Sun offers a ray of hope

Author Bill McKibben talks about the hope of a solar energy future and a chance to heal the planet as he discusses his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.

Transcript:

Rachel: I’m here on Talk of the Bay with Bill McKibben. He has a brand new book out called, here Comes The Sun, A Last Chance For The Climate and a Fresh Chance For Civilization.

A provocative title from an author who has relentlessly pushed the idea that we can. Deal with the climate crisis if we act soon. Bill, what’s different about this book than your previous book seems to be a little bit more optimism, but also increased urgency. How do you balance those two things in this book?

Balancing Optimism and Urgency in Climate Action

McKibben: Well, that’s, it’s, you’re definitely right. Um, we live at a. A very fraught moment. Uh, the things that I’ve been warning about since I wrote the first book about climate change, what we then called the Greenhouse Effect back in the 1980s. Those things are coming true, and they’re coming true with flood and fire and disaster of all kinds at precisely the moment that our democracy is under enormous threat.

And part of that has been an assault on clean energy. So there’s a lot of. Big, bad things happening, I think, on our planet and in our country. But the big good thing that’s happening, uh, and it’s really flying under the radar some, is this super rapid spread of energy from the sun. The last 36 months or so have been just.

Unlike anything that’s ever come before. This is not only the fastest growing energy source on the planet, it’s the fastest growing energy source in the history of the planet. And it’s starting in the places that are taking it really seriously to transform the human relationship with energy. Uh, California is obviously one example.

Uh, most days now California supplies a hundred percent of the electricity that it uses from renewable sources for. Long sections of the day at night. California supplies often its biggest supplier from the grid is now batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon, and as a result, California fourth largest economy on Earth is using about 40% less natural gas to make electricity than it was two years ago.

California’s Progress in Renewable Energy

That’s the kind of change that if we manage to spread it around the world. Quickly, uh, that would knock tenths of a degree off how hot this planet’s eventually going to get. It’s the single most encouraging statistic I’ve come across in almost 40 years of doing this work.

Rachel: That’s wonderful. I, I was left with so many questions.

McKibben: I’ll try to get to them all, but one big one of course is can the current politics of our country, one of the biggest polluters of carbon into the atmosphere? Can politics stop this market force that seems to be making it cheaper and cheaper? It can’t stop the market force, but it may be able to use politics to get in the way, uh, enough to really slow things down in the us you know, the federal government is now just doing one, I think, insanely stupid thing after another.

For instance, they’ve put federal lands off limits for solar and wind, um, but full speed ahead with coal and gas and oil there now. Adding new subsidies to coal in this country. They’re trying to kill off the electric vehicle, uh, uh, progress that we’ve started to make, um, under President Biden, on and on and on.

This can slow things down here at a crucial time, but it is worth remembering that. The US is, at this point, only about 11% of the emissions on the planet. They can’t slow down what’s happening in the rest of the world. In fact, I think that all of Trump’s, uh, talk of