Here Comes the Sun: A Way Forward if We Take It?

Bill McKibben published The End of Nature in 1989 when he was in his twenties.  His book is generally recognized as the first to address what was then called global warming and now more properly labeled AGW, anthropogenic global warming.  I read the book when it was released and it made perfect sense to me at the time.  The foothills of the Appalachians in North Georgia had recently been through an extended stretch of unnaturally hot weather, with temperatures well above 100°F (38°C) for days on end through July and August beginning in the mid- to late-1980s (this has continued, of course).  At the time it was “just the weather.”  But later, the period between the mid-1970s and the late-1980s was recognized as the point at which global average temperatures began their steady rise from the baseline global temperature extending back to the Industrial Revolution.

In Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (2025), an older McKibben notes that he has “chronicled these warnings and they came true.”  I feel much the same.  The global temperature record, well known to anyone paying attention, is here in Our World in Data (click on the time lapse button to get a better appreciation).  Correlation is not causation, but when there is a plausible mechanism underlying the observation, it is a good place to begin.  In this case that would be with the greenhouse effect associated with fossil fuel consumption, which parallels the rise in global temperature.

An analogy with human health is smoking and lung cancer.  Bradford Hill and Richard Doll did not have a mechanism in the after World War II when they began their research, and the Merchants of Doubt used that very effectively, for a while, to cast doubt on their conclusions.  They have continued to this very well since then.  The Great Barrington Declaration is a good recent example.  It is true that not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer.  But of those who do get lung cancer, 90% are or were smokers, and the more they smoked the more likely they were to get lung cancer.  It took more than forty years of basic and clinical research in cancer biology (with probably 95% of it funded by the public) after the British Doctors Study to understand the etiology of cancer and its progression.  The causes of cancer are no longer mysterious.

We know the question and have a good idea of the answer with AGW.  Is the answer final?  Perhaps.  The recent work of Andreas Malm and others is difficult to ignore.  Some of this covered here last year.  David Wallace-Wells is relentless in his analysis of how we got here and the likely consequences.  I put the book aside, half finished, before returning to it after a few years.  He can be found these days at The New York Times.  Andreas Malm began with Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016).  He and Wim Carton lay out the political and social facts of AGW in excruciating detail in Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (2024) and The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late (2025).  Michael Mann [1] tells us in Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis (2023) that what is past may not necessarily be prologue for the current climate.

In Here Comes the Sun McKibben makes the case that solar energy can begin to turn things around, by pointing out that contrary to what economists in the thrall of the “Market” tell us, solar and wind power (the second a function of the first) are much cheaper than generally believed.  Their growth curves are also steep:

If you think that capitalism guarantees we’ll pick the lowest-priced 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 “reserves” 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 are massively gaming our political system.

Well, yes.  That is the point.  The masters of the “economy” are afraid of gargantuan sunk costs, even if keeping them afloat will have dire consequences for the ecosphere of planet Earth and human civilization that depends on it.  It goes without saying that the Trump Administration has embarked on a sprawling effort to achieve “energy dominance based on oil and gas,” not that they are any different from their predecessors going back the Carter Administration that saw solar panels on the White House roof.  These were removed, naturally by Ronald Reagan, because they were un-American.  Will the President Trump and his very focused minions be able to “stuff the solar genie back in the bottle?”  Possibly, but last chances are just that for Big Oil, Gas, and Coal and also for those who recognize our peril:

Solar and wind power are not just better for the climate, they’re also cheaper than energy from fossil fuels.  Not “cheaper once you’ve figured in the costs of climate change.  Just cheaper.”

And there are no technical fixes that will change things if we continue on our present path, despite twisted arguments to the contrary:

If a solar farm makes electricity more cheaply than a gas-fired power plant, ask how much more it will cost to refit that gas-fired power with a chemistry set designed to catch carbon dioxide as it pours from the smokestack and then pump it underground where it can be safely stored (I am not so sure about “safely”).  The answer is, it will cost a lot more, so much more than even with massive government subsidies almost every project of this type has been abandoned.

Occidental Petroleum has given up on carbon capture.  A carbon capture plant in Iceland – known as Mammoth – “manages to capture one millionth of annual global emissions…(and is)…not even capturing enough carbon to account for its own emissions.”  My favorite climate denial snipe hunt (yes, older boys at Boy Scout camp took me on one) was the ExxonMobil project to grow blue-green algae (photosynthetic cyanobacteria) that would produce biofuels.  The project ran for about fifteen years until:

A trial at a Welsh University showed that powering 10 percent of European transport would require growing ponds three times the size of Belgium.  Exxon abandoned the effort (without any fanfare) in 2023; there was no world in which this actually worked, except the world it was designed for – the world of public perception.  As one admiring PR industry newsletter put it, if the algae effort “burnishes the brand as it stares down rough headlines – well, that’s not small potatoes.”

The most delusional plan of all…(is that)…companies making wood pellets are cutting down entire forests (mostly in the southeast US [2]), which removes the most efficient machines we have for taking carbon out of the air; when the trees are burned, the carbon breaks the climate system now.  That it may be removed 80 years hence when the forests recover is no comfort at all.

We do not have eighty years.  Nor will nuclear power work, as Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River south of Augusta has demonstrated beyond all doubt.  Units 3 and 4 took fifteen years and $36.8 billion to build.  The plant is probably producing the most expensive retail electricity on planet Earth:

The new analysis details how the U.S. Department of Energy, Georgia Power, and the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC), conspired to force Georgians into purchasing the most expensive electricity in the world, costing ratepayers $10,784 per kilowatt, compared to $900 – $1,500 per kilowatt for wind, solar, or natural gas.  A separate analysis shows that ratepayers should expect a monthly electricity bill increase of $35 on average, more than double the Georgia Power disclosed estimate of $15 per month.

Move along.  Nothing to see here, except a monthly electricity bill that I am fortunate enough to pay without hardship, for now, and a giant scar upon the Earth.  As for the “pocket” nuclear reactors that will power the AI data centers of our near future, Elon Musk is more likely to colonize and terraform Mars first.

The question remains, though: Can solar power really produce the electricity we need?  Here Comes the Sun is a short book and it lacks a bibliography and index.  The latter defect is a bit irritating, but McKibben did not intend this to be a treatise.  It is more of a summary lesson, and it is well done throughout.  I have checked the references that were easy to track down, meaning I could sit at my computer and use my personal subscriptions for sources behind paywalls.  They support his arguments.  For example, Mark Jacobson made one of the earliest cases for wind versus coal, twenty-five years ago.  As Jacobson put it, the paper got a lot of attention, favorable and otherwise.  But as he noted in 2001:

Much of the recent energy debate in the United States has focused on increasing coal use. However, the cost of wind energy is now less than that of coal. Shifting from coal to wind would address health, environmental, and energy problems.

Energy costs from a new coal power plant are low [(3.5 to 4 ¢/kWh)], but coal-mine dust kills 2000 U.S. miners yearly, and since 1973, the federal black lung-disease benefits program has cost $35 billion.  Coal emissions also cause acid deposition, smog, visibility degradation, and global warming; its particles increase asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and mortality.  Health and environmental costs bring the total costs to 5.5 to 8.3 ¢/kWh

Wind is a clean energy source.  We estimate its costs as follows: installing a 1500-kW turbine with a 77-m rotor diameter and design life of 20 years costs $1.5 million, which pays for the turbine (80%), grid connection (9%), foundation (4%), land (2%), electrical installation (2%), financing (1%), roads (1%), and consultancy (1%). Amortizing this over 20 years at 6 to 8% interest gives $131,000 to $153,000 per year. Adding annual operation and maintenance (O&M) leads to an estimated annual cost of $149,000 to $183,000.

Jacobson also addressed the following, which are very reasonable concerns:

One concern with turbines is harm to birds.  This might be mitigated by siting turbines out of migration paths.  Also, turbine output is unresponsive to electricity demand.  This is moot when wind is one of many energy sources.  Finally, remote turbines require extra transmission lines.  This cost can be offset with turbine mass production. Government promotion would also catalyze private investment.

How many birds are killed by oil refineries, natural gas works, tar sands spoil pits, fracking pads, and skyscrapers?  And yes, there must be backups for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow (batteries, pump-storage, on-demand natural gas generating plants).  As for “government promotion,”  we should remember that wind and solar will also support good jobs at good wages, in perpetuity for the men and women who build the infrastructure and maintain it.  They are and will be proud of the work they have done.  One such plant that makes solar panels using the latest technology is thriving in the deeply Republican Congressional District in Northwest Georgia that was represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene until January 5^th.  Imagine that.  And much of this has been done with government subsidies.  Public capital is real and not just for war.  This reminder makes one sit up and take notice in a world that has forgotten and persists in studiously, and stupidly, ignoring Mariana Mazzucato:

Mark Wilson, a historian at the University of North Carolina, has written the most comprehensive account of that period (1940-1945).  It details how the federal government birthed a welter of new agencies with names like the War Production Board and the Defense Corporation; the latter, between 1940 and 1945, spent $9 billion on 2,300 projects in 46 states.  “It was public capital that built most of this stuff, not Wall Street.”

Compare that with the manufacture of the (sometime) Flying Swiss Army Knife known as the F-35.  Components for this plane are produced in a similar number of states, for a product that cannot do the job for which it was intended.  Imagine that.  And $9 billion in January 1945 is the equivalent of $164 billion in November 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, or about 9% of the proposed Department of War budget of $1.5 trillion for 2027.  Except the solar/wind energy projects would work and last for more than twenty years at a time, while ongoing research and development will make them more durable and efficient.

What about the increased throughput through the economy required by a solar transition, which was identified as the single problem for a sustainable economy by Herman Daly more than fifty years ago?  From McKibben’s reference to Cory Doctorow on battery self-sufficiency:

125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport.  In other words, we’re talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.

This is a big engineering project. We’ve done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil — all of that was done in living memory.

Facts are stubborn things.  And here are a few relevant factoids about electric vehicles that should make Elon Musk and the current CEO of Ford take notice:

In March 2025, China’s leading carmaker announced it had cut the charging time for an EV to five minutes, barely longer than it takes to fill a tank at the pump.

On that note, last Sunday a friend enthusiastically regaled his companions with tales of how his new Tesla drives itself and tells him how to manage range when making a 200-mile roundtrip through the middle of the middle of nowhere in Central Georgia, by showing where he can add 20% by stopping at one and only one charging station for ten minutes.  I didn’t have the heart to ask what happens if the charging station is out of service on a Sunday afternoon when the only other things open are the Dollar General and Dairy Queen.  And this:

The new (2025) Zeekr Mix minivan…gets not just 340 miles on a charge but also features heated, ventilated and massaging seats that face each other and an interior that can transform into a lounge for card games with friends, a relaxing and comfortable fishing spot or even a private yoga studio…(OK, a bit much, but on the other hand)…the Lincoln Navigator now comes with 13 cupholders, so there’s that.

In 2024 Chinese companies started producing EV models with 600,000-mile warranties, and if you eventually do need to replace your battery pack, by the end of 2024 that was less expensive than buying a new engine for (a car with an internal combustion engine).

Some nations are serious.  Some nations are not.  And yes, we do have the space for solar/wind installations, but NIMBYism remains a problem, especially for swells of every persuasion.  According to Mark Jacobson, again, fossil fuel infrastructure uses about 1.3 percent of land in the United States, “including active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms.”  Jacobson calculates that worldwide, “the total new footprint required (for solar/wind) is about 0.17%” of the available space (on land and at sea)…”  By contrast, at the moment the US devotes (too much of its land) – both pasture and cropland  to feeding cows.”  And then there are the Midwestern corn fields that are inefficient gasoline plants (ethanol).  Or to put it in terms that make sense:

A few years ago, 200 scientists at 31 colleges and universities across Iowa signed a statement noting that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of (corn) ethanol…Or to do the math one more way, you could supply all the energy the US currently uses by covering 30 million acres with solar panels.  How much land to we currently devote to growing corn ethanol? About 30 million acres.”

Some nations are serious.  Some nations are not.  I have seen large solar farms in sunny Middle Georgia on land that was previous used for the industrial production – not farming – of commodity corn and soybeans.  The solar farms are to be preferred.  If the $7 trillion spent on fossil fuel subsidies each year according to the International Monetary Fund was redirected, a solar transition would be possible at scale.  And my south-facing aluminum roof would be the perfect spot for solar panels that could provide most of the power for my 1858, i.e., relatively leaky, house throughout the year, if the Public Service Commission had not been captured by the utility companies.  This has made it difficult to convert to solar, but things could be changing in a world in which incumbents lose 63-37.  That both losers were Republicans is immaterial.

Is Bill McKibben’s brief for the rapid transition to solar power convincing?  Yes, as far as it goes.  Is the transition likely given current political reality?  Certainly not.  But climate catastrophe is staring back at us from the abyss, and we must do something.  Solar and wind are the only way forward in our full world.  Moreover, if it is to work, it will do so in two ways.  The first is by providing the power necessary for a humane life we can have if we do the right thing.

The second is directly connected to the nature of solar power.  Energy from the sun is diffuse, so its power can he shared democratically throughout the world, Global South and Global North alike.  McKibben is very good on how this could develop.  When the necessary economy, rather than the false economy of consumption above all else, is untethered from fossil fuels and their strategically placed handmaidens of Big Government, independence will be the largest benefit to humanity, excepting those people in the C-suites of Big Oil and Big Gas and Big (but shrinking) Coal.  Each year the sun provides us with:

720 times more energy than humans currently use.  That’s a conceivable number – it means that we can harvest a small fraction of it and have far more than we need.  It means that we can count on the sun…The sun rises every morning, and it shines more of less the same intensity each day.

And it will continue to do so on all people for the life of the human species, that is, on any conceivable human time scale.  This is not a difficult thing to understand.  One final question is whether Mark Fisher was correct when he channeled Fredric Jameson in Capitalist Realism and noted that “it’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” – the heedless and destructive capitalism we have come to know too well as the Neoliberal Dispensation has taken hold of our collective imagination.

To end on a positive note from Bill McKibben:

But with all the paeans that Lennon and McCartney deserve, the (Beatles’s) most popular sing (by far) is the George Harrison composition from which this book takes its title.  It’s been streamed 1.6 billion times on Spotify, twice as many as “Hey Jude” or “Let It Be” or “Yesterday.”  I think it’s because we live at a hard moment and because it points a way to something better.

There is much work to be done as the world gets smaller and more humane in the coming years.  If we do not do it, the smaller world will be better off without us.  Finally, to my friends who are convinced AGW is a hoax of some kind, why is the conversion to solar power a bad thing?  The oil, coal, and gas will only last that much longer if we moderate our use.  This will give us time to adapt to their inevitable exhaustion on a finite planet.  Win, win for everyone.

Notes

[1] Michael Mann has been lionized and demonized because of his “hockey stick graph,” which has been confirmed in multiple studies using distinct datasets.  The key point of the hockey stick graph is that when living systems such as the entire ecosphere change so rapidly, a collapse always follows because equilibrium cannot be reestablished.

[2] As a native son of Southeastern North America, I take this personally.  But I have learned recently that locals have reacted as they should to this outrage and it may be ending.