Here Comes the Sun: Bill McKibben on Solar Power, Climate Hope, and Ending Fossil Fuels

I want to do my small bit toward helping this major idea on its way.

Here is a way this major book is advertised:

“Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben

From the acclaimed environmentalist, a call to harness the power of the sun and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future.

Our climate, and our democracy, are melting down. But Bill McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis, insists the moment is also full of possibility. Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history―if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.

Here Comes the Sun tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind―and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay. From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid in a year to the world’s sixth-largest economy―California―nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. You can’t hoard solar energy or hold it in reserves―it’s available to all.

There’s no guarantee we can make this change in time, but there is a hope―in McKibben’s eyes, our best hope for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.”

A couple of quotes from Here Comes The Sun:

“My point here is that, precisely because the conversion to things like heat pumps and EVs would cut energy use dramatically, the fossil fuel industry is going all out to make sure it doesn’t happen. In fact, the entire point of the industry by this point in its history is to make sure we keep burning something. It’s desperate, as we shall see, to slow down this switch by any means necessary—sometimes by bribing Instagram influencers, more often by buying political influence. It seizes on any event—the rise of AI, the fall of Ukraine—to insist that we prolong the life of its products,” p 32.

And

“We’ve subsidized fossil fuels for centuries—the International Monetary fund said in 2023 that if you added it all up, the world was giving coal and oil and gas $7 trillion a year, [Seven trillion dollars is represented as the number 7 followed by 12 zeros (7,000,000,000,000). To visualize it, if you were to count one dollar per second, it would take over 221,000 years to reach that amount] above all by letting them use the atmosphere as an open sewer for free. We desperately need to subsidize clean energy for a couple of decades, in order to get ourselves out of the emergency all those hydrocarbons have created,” p 168-9.

Here are questions we can each ask ourselves: Why am I in this world? Why am I here Now?

Here’s one answer

“I see myself as a person learning from all the human beings I meet and from the future around me. I experience this with a feeling of happiness and of humility vis-a-vis this endlessly great creation,” p 220.

Ayya Khema, I Give You My Life: The Autobiography Of A Western Buddhist Nun, Shambhala, 2000.

[My apologies: Reading, Writing currently consumes most of my dwindling energy.]
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