Amid all of the political turmoil and global crises, one source of hope stands out: our ability to power modern life with zero emissions. Scientists warn that to limit global warming, emissions need to be cut significantly in the coming years to reach net-zero by mid-century. Bill McKibben, founder of climate justice organization 350.org and Third Act, joins WITHpod to discuss his new book “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” reasons he’s optimistic and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Bill McKibben: We can have a world that runs on a resource that’s available to everyone, everywhere. That’s a very different thing than a resource that can be hoarded and held in reserve and doled out as needed. And it’s here, by the way, that I think that the rest of the world is really catching on.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I was on vacation, blessedly, for two weeks, which was incredible. Thank you to all the folks that helped make that possible, including Antonia Hylton and Ali Velshi, my colleagues who filled in. And let me tell you, I really tried to take a break from the news as much as possible. It sort of pokes in. And when you’re away from it, you are really struck by just how relentlessly bad it feels. Like, I just kept getting these alerts. I was like, what, there’s tanks in D.C.? There’s, I mean, not tanks, but there’s MRAPs in D.C. and they’re, every day, he’s giving Putin a flyover and they’ve got American soldiers on their hands and knees rolling on a red carpet for it. Like, what?
And so, today’s podcast is so needed and so great and I am so excited for it because there are many good stories happening in the world at all times, I mean, that’s genuinely true. But there is one good story happening in the world that’s the most important good story and also the most important story. It’s actually probably the most civilizationally transformative moment since the Industrial Revolution and the discovery of fossil fuels. And it is also just not covered.
It’s so crazy. It’s a complete, utter revolution in the means by which we power our civilization that is happening before our eyes. And for all of the talk of A.I. and all the hype about A.I. and all the talk about the end of the neoliberal order and all the talk about a million things and the talk about the climate crisis, which is acute and getting worse, this story, which is the one genuinely uplifting, promising, exciting story, which is that we now have the means at our disposal right now, right now, we have the ability to power the planet and modern industrialized life with zero emissions. And it’s not just the zero emissions, as we’ll get into. It’s actually a complete transformation of the model of energy consumption, of who owns and controls that energy, what it does for the economy, for how people operate in the universe. Like, we are on the precipice of a totally transformational moment and very few people are talking about it. And there’s one huge exception to this, which is someone who I admired and have been a fan of for many years. He’s been a guest on the podcast before. He is the legendary writer and environmentalist, Bill McKibben. He’s the founder of 350.org and Third Act, which are both focused on the climate crisis. He’s the author of 21 books, going back to “The End of Nature,” which was a huge hit, to his most recent one, which is on this very topic. It’s called “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.”
Bill McKibben, welcome back to “Why Is This Happening?”
Bill McKibben: Friend, so good to be with you.
Chris Hayes: So you write a little bit in the intro in a sort of funnily self-aware way about like your book, “The End of Nature,” which I think was your first big title, which was kind of praised for its like dark realism, I think is the phrase you use, and the kind of role you’ve taken as the, you know, a little bit of the prophet, of the seer of dark truths, the troubles that lie ahead, all of which makes the positiveness of this book have to me an extra heft in credibility. Tell me about how you think of your journey as an observer of our present and future.
Bill McKibben: Yes, it is a very odd moment for me, because you’re right, my life has been spent necessarily as a kind of professional bummer-outer of other people. I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change, what we then called the greenhouse effect when I was in my 20s back in the 1980s, and so I’ve gotten to watch this most desperate of problems all the way through. And it’s more desperate than ever. And we could spend easily an hour talking about exactly what kind of dire straits we’re in ‘cause everything that I wrote about in the 1980s and more has come true and come true in big, hard, dangerous ways.
But there is, as you say, one big, good thing happening in the midst of all the big, bad things that are happening on our planet. And it is going so far largely unnoticed. That’s the explosion over the last 36 months of renewable energy finally taking its place. Solar power is not just the biggest new source of energy right now, it’s the biggest new source of energy ever. The speed with which this transition is beginning to happen, especially in the rest of the world, is nothing short of astonishing. There was an excerpt from this book in “The New Yorker” earlier this summer, and lots and lots of people who read it, including people who are deep into the climate and the environment, were saying to me, I had no idea. I had no idea this was going on, which, of course, as a reporter, is gratifying. You like to be in that position.
But I think we need to get past that quickly. And here’s what I think has happened. For 40 years, clean energy, energy from the sun and wind, we’ve tagged it in our mind as alternative energy. That’s the file folder we’ve stuck it in in our brain. And the result of that is that we don’t quite take it seriously. So I’ll give you an example. Google, last year, struck a deal, which turns out probably not to be happening, but that they would buy 500 megawatts worth of nuclear power. And there were 100 stories in the paper about a nuclear renaissance underway, and on and on and on.
So, 500 megawatts is half a gigawatt of power. This May, the Chinese were putting up three gigawatts of solar power every day.
Chris Hayes: What?
Bill McKibben: A gigawatt’s roughly the equivalent of a coal-fired power plant. So they were putting one up every eight hours, solar panels, as opposed to the Google nuclear renaissance that might give us half a gigawatt by 2035, okay? That’s their expensive timeline.
This is truly astonishing. And by the way, for the people who really like nuclear power, and there are a lot of them, especially on Twitter.
Chris Hayes: Isn’t it weird? Wait, can we just say for a second, I’ve gone back and forth in my life about my feelings on nuclear power, and they’ve actually changed a bit, and I’m probably more pro-nuclear than I used to be.
Bill McKibben: Me too. Yes.
Chris Hayes: But it’s not, some people feel about nuclear power the way that they feel about their sports team.
Bill McKibben: Yes, exactly right.
Chris Hayes: There are people whose online identity is, it’s very, I find it very weird.
Bill McKibben: For those people, the good news is that the sun is the largest nuclear reactor that we have access to.
Chris Hayes: It’s the line you used in the book, yes.
Bill McKibben: And there it is, just 93 million miles away, converting hydrogen into helium.
Chris Hayes: And sending us the beams for free, we have no transmission lines.
Bill McKibben: Giving us the power absolutely for free. I think the way to think about this is our local star already gives us warmth, and light, and photosynthesis, and now it’s announcing that it’s happy to give us all the power we could ever need. We can capture those photovoltaic rays directly, or we can take advantage of the sun differentially heating the Earth, producing the wind that turns those majestic turbines. And that provides us with more power than we could ever use at prices that it’s hard for us to even imagine how cheap they are compared to everything else we’ve done, even before you take into account the cost of destroying the planet’s climate, which really is something we might want to take into account too.
Chris Hayes: Let’s talk a little bit, let’s run through a little bit of the sort of stats, the kind of, the landscape of this transition, and then I want to kind of go back and talk about, the book is very beautiful because it’s, at one level, it’s a book about a technical change in how we get energy, but it’s actually a profound meditation on like what it is to live in a solar system and be a living creature, and where we get our energy from, and the fact that like at some elemental level, the reason we’re here is the sun, and that it’s sort of a perfect distance away, and there’s something sort of beautifully symmetrical about coming back around to that reality is the way we’re going to power the future.
But just at the technical level, you said the China stuff, like, give me a little more, I mean, from California to Pakistan to other places about what this looks like on the ground.
Bill McKibben: So, California is a beautiful example. California is not doing everything right, they’re in fact making some mistakes and so on, but there was enough momentum behind California’s move towards clean energy over the last decade that it reached some kind of tipping point about 15 months ago. Now, almost every day, California produces more than 100% of the power it uses from electricity it uses from renewable energy for long stretches of the day.
That means that at night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply on the California’s grid is often batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon, batteries that did not exist three years ago. Bottom line, and this is the number that really blew me away when Mark Jacobson at Stanford sent it to me. Bottom line, California in 2025 is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago.
Chris Hayes: These are the kinds of numbers, as, I mean, you have been in this fight much longer than I have, but these are the kinds of numbers that 15 or 20 years ago, you would say, look, if we’re going to pull this off, we’re going to have to do something crazy like-
Bill McKibben: Exactly right.
Chris Hayes: Reduce carbon emissions by 40% in a two-year period. And everyone would be like, well.
Bill McKibben: Yes, yes. Those are the kind of numbers that applied around the world knock a few tenths of a degree of how hot our planet gets. And remember, every tenth of a degree Celsius that we warm this planet moves another 100 million of our brothers and sisters out of a comfortable climatic zone and into the place where they’re probably going to have to move.
So, this is remarkable. What’s more remarkable to me is that California is now being outdone, at least in volume of this stuff, by Texas, which is the headquarters of the world hydrocarbon industry. But nonetheless, the economics of sun and wind and batteries are so compelling that they’re going in at a pell-mell rate.
The fossil fuel industry this spring in Texas tried to do the same thing they were doing in Washington. In Washington, they were successful, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in trying to slow down. But in Texas, their main vehicle was a bill that everyone thought would pass that was described as DEI for natural gas. It would require anybody putting in five megawatts of solar to also put in five megawatts worth of natural gas. People started appearing out of the rural hinterlands, coming to Austin and saying, do not do this. This is how we fund our school system now, with our solar arrays, with our wind. This is what keeps the old folks’ home open in our rural county.
And the legislature, obviously the Texas legislature is not a progressive place. It’s currently trying to arrest its Democratic members, so that it can redistrict. But they backed right off and said, okay, we won’t do this. Even more remarkable is what’s happening in some of the poorest parts of the world. So, Pakistan, right next to China, so easy border to import stuff across. There’s a lot of excess capacity in China manufacturing solar panels, and so they’re cheap. And some of the people who were two years ago, you know, importing rice or cement or whatever, started importing solar panels. Pakistan has a expensive and unreliable power grid. And so people were grateful for this.
And it’s actually a remarkable story. About 18 months ago, energy analysts were kind of taken aback because the amount of electricity being used on the national grid began to fall, went down about 10%. That never happens. Humans just use more energy every year, unless COVID, you know. So they couldn’t figure out what was happening until people started looking at images on Google Earth of the rooftops of, you know, Karachi and Islamabad and Lahore. And you could just watch, like, you know, mushrooms coming up after a rain in the forest, the solar panels just spreading almost hour by hour. Within eight months, people in Pakistan, not the government in Pakistan, people, built the equivalent of half the country’s national electric grid with solar panels.
Chris Hayes: Wow. This is like total DIY. Like, you buy it from a guy, and you just go put it up on your roof.
Bill McKibben: On your factory, on your mini mall. You buy it from a guy, and then what you do is go on TikTok and watch lots of videos with Hindustani music in the background, where guys are like, here’s how you stick this into that, and whatever. It’s a good reminder, by the way, that none of the other, no one’s going to build a nuclear power plant on their roof of their, you know, I hope not, anyway, their Karachi apartment building.
The biggest adopters in Pakistan were farmers. Now, you’ve traveled in rural Asia, so you know that the soundtrack of that part of the world is the hum or cough of diesel generators –
Chris Hayes: Diesel generators, yes.
Bill McKibben: That are pumping up the irrigation water from those deep tube wells that are the kind of residue of the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Diesel’s often the biggest input for Pakistani farmers, so they were early adopters here. And for the most part, they lacked the money to build the steel supports that you’d use to hold these things up. They just laid them down on the ground, pointing at the sun. Pakistan used 35% less diesel last year than it had the year before. That’s, again, the kind of, and every place that China’s trade networks go now, you can see the same thing starting to happen, especially across big parts of Africa.
It’s very clear that for the 800 million or 900 million people who still lack electricity on this planet, the way they’re going to get it is from little mini grids and things in their rural communities.
Chris Hayes: Yes, and this is one of those other things where having covered this for a long time, again, 10 or 15 years ago, one of the things people would say is, look, if we’re going to get this done, it cannot be the case that we keep people in energy poverty, right? Everyone in the world has a right to these energy resources.
And also, we can’t bring those people into a basic level of energy security using fossil fuel and not destroy the planet. So the model I always heard was, look, if you look at cell phone deployment in a lot of parts of the global South, people got their first cell phone before they ever got a wired phone because the technology was cheap, it was portable, it could get to anywhere. So, and the whole idea was, we got to figure out some energy version of that, or we’re cooked.
And what we’re seeing really, again, I can’t stress this enough, really for the first time in the last few years is exactly that happening.
Bill McKibben: Exactly right. And it’s happening with what we’re calling mini grids across, especially across Africa. It’s amazing to be in these communities and watch it happen. I was a couple of years ago in a community in Ghana, a remote, poor village. It was hot as hell because it’s near the equator. I was, it was the day after they’d fired up their mini grid, and I was sitting with the village elders, and we were talking, and they kept handing me bottles of cold water to drink, for which I was grateful because I’m a Vermonter, and I don’t deal well with heat. But in my clueless Western way, it took me about 15 minutes to figure out why they were so proud to be handing me this stuff.
Until the day before, there really hadn’t been anything cold in that community. There was no refrigerator. Now, the best argument for the refrigerator is you can store vaccines, and people in Ghana still believe in vaccines, but the second best argument for it is it’s nice to have a cold drink or an ice cream sandwich or something every once in a while.
Chris Hayes: So this is happening now, and it’s happening, it’s really accelerating. It’s already been the case that for the last, I think five to 10 years, solar deployment keeps overshooting what the International Energy Association had kind of predicted, so it keeps beating, but it’s really kind of taking off.
Why is this? What has come together to make now this moment that it’s happening?
Bill McKibben: This is mostly pure economics with some serious activism in the background. It’s a fascinating story. We almost got to this point in the 1970s. Jimmy Carter, in his last budget in 1980, proposed enough money for research that the U.S. should have been producing 20% of its power by the year 2000 from the sun.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Bill McKibben: That obviously went by the board when Ronald Reagan was elected and tore the solar panels off the White House roof. The next important thing that happened was at the turn of the century, when the Green Party in Germany held the balance of power in their parliamentary system and used it to exact the fairly high-priced promise from the leaders of Germany that they would pay good rate for electricity produced by people from their rooftops. The Germans called this the Energiewende, the energy transition. That created, expensively, demand in Germany, and the Chinese used that demand to perfect the manufacturing of this stuff. And it’s just gotten better and better and better and continues to get better year after year after year.
The way to think about it, Chris, is that it’s less a commodity like coal or gas or oil, though there are commodities like lithium or stuff that we should talk about, but it’s less that than it is sort of human brain power. Every time we double the amount of solar that we install on the planet, the cost drops in half. And that’s the kind of exponential cycle down that eventually creates this exponential growth up.
About five years ago, we passed an invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from setting things on fire. And combined with the kind of resolve post-Paris of at least some countries to do something about climate, this helped produce the basis for this dramatic, dramatic, dramatic expansion. And here’s the thing that makes it so Hollywood and crazy, it’s happening at exactly, and I mean exactly the same moment that the climate itself is spiraling out of control.
June 2023 is the key month. That’s the month that climatologists say, temperatures are now spiking again. We’ve just seen the hottest temperatures in the last 125,000 years. Every month since June of 2023 has been the hottest August, the second hottest October, whatever. We’re up on this new plateau. June 2023 is also the month when human beings start installing more than a gigawatt of solar power a day around the planet.
So we’re in this race. If we weren’t in this race, then there’d be no need for us to be talking about this except just as a kind of gee whiz story.
Chris Hayes: Because it would win the race.
Bill McKibben: Over time, economics will do the job. Forty years from now, we’re going to run the planet on sun and wind, but if it takes us anything like 40 years, it’s going to be a completely broken planet that we run on sun and wind. And by broken, I mean, we’re now watching the Jet Stream and the Gulf Stream flicker and falter in ways that are almost unimaginable. The deepest systems of our planet are now beginning to unravel, and we don’t have much time to fix them, hence, the need for activists to stay active.
Sun Day is coming up on September 21st, and hopefully there’ll be events all across America with people trying just to drive home this basic understanding that this is no longer alternative energy.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: So, I want to talk about a few of the sort of critiques of, we’re mostly talking about solar, wind is too, and of course you make the point in the book that wind power is just solar power by another means, right? The sun unevenly heats the Earth. So I want to talk a bit about some of the, the sort of two critiques you hear, sometimes I think leveraged in good faith, and sometimes I think leveraged in bad faith, but both worth responding to and both which you take some time with in the book. The first is the kind of, is just the resource extraction necessary for the production. And I think people have seen images of like brutal open pit mines in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries, very poor countries where people are mining some of the goods, particularly lithium and rare earth, which are two of the big ones that we need for both solar and batteries.
And this idea that like, well, you’re replacing one form of environmental degradation with another.
Bill McKibben: Right. So, at some level it’s correct. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but there are definitely more expensive lunches and less expensive lunches. And this falls into the latter category and by a huge margin. And if you think about it for a minute, it becomes clear why. So, yes, you got to go say, obtain some lithium or some cobalt. But once you obtain them, you stick the lithium in a battery where it does its thing for the next 25 years. Once the battery degrades, now we have, because lithium’s valuable, ongoing recycling programs that take the lithium out of the battery and you start all over again. What do you do when you mine coal? You set it on fire.
Chris Hayes: It doesn’t stick around long.
Bill McKibben: You set it on fire and you have to mine some more the next day. 25 years from now, it’s long forgotten, except for the cloud of carbon in the atmosphere. So the Rocky Mountain Institute last fall put out a report saying that the total volume of minerals we’re going to mine for the battery transition by 2050 is less than the amount of coal, volume of coal we mined last year. A way to think about this in your mind, just to sort of get a picture in your head, imagine a ship crossing the ocean carrying a cargo of solar panels. Over its lifetime, that cargo of solar panels will produce 500 times as much energy as the same ship carrying a cargo of coal across the ocean.
This is a fantastically big change. We’re talking about a resource, and here’s the place where I think people with good faith objections need to think a little more deeply. We’re talking about a resource, clean energy, that no longer requires filling the air with not just carbon dioxide, but with all the particulates that flow out from burning fossil fuel. Nine million people a year, Chris, die from breathing that stuff. That’s about one death in five on this planet. If you’ve been to New Delhi in recent years, you understand how that can be true. But even in this country, lots and lots of cases of childhood asthma and whatever else.
We’re also talking about a commodity, fossil fuel, that spawns an extraordinary amount of the inequality and strife that makes our planet such an unhappy place. Think for a moment about what the geopolitics of the world would have looked like over the last 70 years if oil was of trivial value, okay?
I mean, humans are good at fighting wars, but it’s going to take something to figure out how to fight a war over sunshine, you know? And think about the degree to which the dependence on a resource that’s only available in a couple of places, think about what that does to the power of the people who control those places. Our biggest oil and gas barons in this country were Charles and David Koch. They controlled more refining and pipeline capacity than anybody else. Think about the number of stories you’ve done in your lifetime about what the Koch brothers did with their winnings from this. Chris Hayes: Yes. Bill McKibben: If people are surprised that Trump has been able to knock over the pillars of our democratic system as easily as he has, thank the Koch brothers for sawing off those pillars over the last three decades.
Look abroad. Vladimir Putin’s the biggest oil and gas baron in Europe. He used his winnings to fund a land war in Europe in the 21st century. We can have a world that runs on a resource that’s available to everyone, everywhere. That’s a very different thing than a resource that can be hoarded and held in reserve and doled out as needed.
And it’s here, by the way, that I think that the rest of the world is really catching on. You know, Europe, after the invasion of Ukraine, became very committed to this renewable energy project in a way that it hadn’t been before. And now, at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, Donald Trump, who’s trying everything he can to slow down this transition, is trying to use our tariff policy to induce countries around the world to buy American liquefied natural gas to run their electric systems. He’ll be able to do some of that in the short run. It’s a shakedown and it’ll be successful. But in even the medium term, any sane ruler, any place else in the world, is thinking, do I really want to tie my energy future to a country as fickle and erratic as the United States? Or would I be better off buying this Chinese technology that frees me from depending on anyone going forward?
Indonesia, two weeks ago, announced plans to build 100 gigawatts worth of solar power over the next decade. That’ll be an enormous change in what is, I don’t know, the third or fourth most populated country on Earth.
So I think even, at least abroad, the Trumpian attempt to slow all this down probably won’t. Here at home, more difficult.
Chris Hayes: The other big objection, which is a technical one, is about what’s called baseload, right? That the advantage that a nuclear reactor, coal-fired power plant, natural gas have are that they just reliably produce energy as long as you feed them the fuel, or as long as the reactor’s going for, you know, all the time.
Bill McKibben: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And sun and wind are intermittent. And this is not a crazy objection. It’s a real one and has been a–
Bill McKibben: The sun, in fact, does go down.
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes, exactly.
Bill McKibben: That is a real objection. And the answer to it is the one word, batteries, which should not be a, you know, completely foreign concept to most of us. I mean, you know, I’m an old guy, but not so old that I didn’t have a transistor radio in my youth, you know? I’ve lived with batteries my whole life. Now those batteries are big and cheap, and they’re increasingly, by the way, using all kinds of interesting things to make them work. We’re not going to run out of lithium. It turns out there’s lots of it, but we may not be using it that much longer. The new generation of Chinese EVs, this year, many of them are featuring sodium ion batteries.
So that base load thing is, in fact, cuts exactly the other way now. Texas, the head of the Energy Reliability Council of Texas, which is what they call their kind of, Texas has its own entire grid.
Chris Hayes: Grid, yes.
Bill McKibben: And they’ve had big trouble with that grid in the last few years, as you know. Blackouts during those freezes and heat waves. You know, that’s why Ted Cruz had to abandon ship and head to Acapulco and whatever. The head of the Energy Reliability Council in Texas said a couple of weeks ago, we don’t think there’s any danger this year of blackout or brownout on our grid, because now we have so much renewable energy and the batteries that store it. That’s good, stable energy supply. The third difficulty that people cite, and for me, the one that, in some ways, I thought would be the hardest to deal with was this question of how much land you use and take up by putting up solar panels and windmills.
But it turns out that, in some ways, that was the part of the book I enjoyed writing the most, because it opened your mind in all kinds of ways. I mean, I live in a county that grows mostly corn, and corn is the biggest crop in America that we grow. But it turns out that half of the corn that we grow is gasoline. We’re growing ethanol. Literally half.
Chris Hayes: I mean, that is, first of all, that’s crazy. Half of the corn.
Bill McKibben: That’s insane. It’s insane. And it gets even more insane when you start actually looking at the numbers. So I was standing in a cornfield in Illinois this time last summer, with a farmer who grew corn for ethanol and was converting much of his fields to solar arrays. He said, I can grow in this acre, and he pointed to an acre in a good farmerly way, he said, in this acre, I can grow enough ethanol to run my Ford F-150 pickup, most beloved vehicle in the American iconography. It’ll run 25,000 miles off the ethanol I can grow on an acre in a year. If I cover that same acre with solar panels, then I can produce enough electrons to run my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, I can run that not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles. Okay?
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Bill McKibben: Which begins to give you —
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s a great stat. That is a great stat.
Bill McKibben: It gives you some sense, and, but here’s the really cool part, if you ask me. Having put the solar panels in this field, he’s still got half the field to work with because there are big rows in between the solar panels. And in those rows, we’re now building this entire new science called agrivoltaics, which takes advantage of the fact that on an overheated world, shade is a real in-demand commodity. Shade and the moisture that it can retain that doesn’t evaporate as much.
There were new studies, there are a lot of different studies about a lot of different crops, but the one that caught my eye recently was out of France, where they were showing that for a number of varietals, wine grape yields were up 60% in fields with solar panels in them. Here in Vermont, we are increasingly interplanting solar farms with species that attract native pollinators, wildflowers of different kinds. And the number of insects is up 100 times compared to a field of corn. And what that means is that for the farmers in the adjacent areas who have things like orchards, fruit set is up 30% and 40% because there’s lots of insects hard at work. They’re dealing with the biodiversity crisis in the same field that they’re dealing with the climate crisis. It allows for so much more human creativity than the kind of industrial monoculture that we’ve grown accustomed to.
So I think on a lot of fronts, it’s a lot of fun.
Chris Hayes: That point you just made, I think brings us to an interesting part of the physics here, which also will then relate to the sort of fascinating, deep question about the trajectory of human technology. But part of the reason that that acre of corn, made into ethanol, put into a internal combustion engine will go 25,000 miles, whereas the solar array can charge it for 700,000 has to do with efficiency on both ends. So there’s the efficiency on the, it’s not that efficient to grow corn and then refine it to ethanol and then light it on fire and burn it. But it’s also the engine of a car that has to make a constant recurring explosion as opposed to just power a drivetrain off a battery.
People, I think, don’t quite understand what a, in some ways, preposterous engineering achievement the internal combustion engine is. It shouldn’t work, it certainly shouldn’t work with the reliability, scale, and safety that it does when you consider the fact that it’s a highly flammable material running a constant set of explosions everywhere we go all the time, powering everything.
Bill McKibben: Think about the entire sort of supply chain. In order to make it work now, you have to know how to go and drill beneath the surface of the sea or frack the underground geology in order to produce, get it to a refinery, which is the most complicated piece of technology we have, separate out the various components of the oil, get them to the gas station, put them in your tank, run this engine with 2000 moving parts. And mostly what that engine produces is waste heat. It’s only about 30% of the energy actually drives the car down the road, okay? Same with the furnace in your basement.
Or you could have a solar panel on your roof, run it through a cord to the car in your garage. This is what I do. The engine has 20 moving parts and it’s three or four times more efficient at using that energy. It’s mostly not producing heat. It’s mostly producing what a physicist would call work.
The heat pump replacing the furnace in the basement is the same way, three or four times more efficient in its use of energy. So really, by the time we convert the whole planet to renewable energy, we’re going to be using less primary energy than we do now.
Chris Hayes: That’s because we waste so much of it in heat we don’t use. The car engine’s just making a ton of heat and then it has to convert that into the movings of the pistons and then the drivetrain, right? And then it’s also got to deal with emitting that and it’s got to vent it and it’s got to cool the engine down, which is why you have a whole complicated system to cool it and why you got to put oil and coolant in.
Bill McKibben: And in the process, it manages to destroy the climate of the planet, which is, then creates, among other things, the need for immense amounts of energy to run air conditioners and whatever else. All of this was worth doing for 250 years when we didn’t quite understand what the implications were and when we had no choice. But now we have a choice. In 1954, some guys at Bell Labs in New Jersey powered by, funded by my parents, your grandparents, dropping dimes in pay phones across America, they used that money to invent this solar cell. It’s an unbelievably beautiful piece of technology.
Long after we’ve forgotten about all the other inventions of the 20th century, the solar cell and the nonviolent social movement will be the two inventions of the 20th century that hang on, and we’re going to need them working together to make this work. But that beautiful invention is the technology that we’re now ceding to the Chinese.
The Chinese, let’s be clear, are not eating our lunch. A cadre of red-capped waiters has been dispatched to Beijing to cater that lunch for them, okay? Donald Trump’s crusade against solar power and wind power is the greatest gift that the authoritarian government in China could ever have asked for. It’s going to cement their technological leadership for the rest of this century, and it’s going to cement their political leadership.
Chris Hayes: And global leadership.
Bill McKibben: Exactly, we’re headed towards the first global climate talks this year in Brazil, COP30, the first one that will happen without the participation of the U.S. Xi Jinping is, I mean, just, I don’t know whether licking one’s chops is an expression that the Chinese use, but that’s what he’s, you know, must be doing. Because this is just stupidity on a enormous level, and all at the service of the fossil fuel industry. I mean, it’s not like this is complicated. A year ago this time, candidate Trump said, give me a billion dollars and you can have anything you want. Well, the fossil fuel industry ponied up about half a billion between donations, advertising, lobbying in the last election cycle. And that was plenty. They’ve been awarded everything they could ever have asked for.
And if they got, if everything went right for them, if they were able to keep this going for 10 or 15 years, the result would be only that the U.S. would become a kind of colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion, where people from around the world who could still get tourist visas arrive to gawp at, you know, how they did things in the olden days. It’s truly astonishing that Joe Biden did his level best to allow America to begin to catch up to the Chinese. That’s what the IRA was about, an attempt to jumpstart our efforts here. That’s been abandoned. So now we have to start again. That’s what Sun Day is about.
And in this case, you know, for the next 18 months, we’re not going to be able to influence Washington, obviously. But the good news is there’s a ton of stuff that can be done at the state and local level to make this easier. And let me give you one example, two examples. If you want to put solar on your roof, if you own a house, it costs three or four times as much in this country as it does in Australia or the E.U. And the reason is a little bit because we put tariffs on solar panels, but that’s the smallest part of it. It’s mostly because we have a Byzantine and Baroque permitting system here.
Every municipality makes up its own rules. You have to do endless inspections and wiring diagrams and on and on and on.
Chris Hayes: I’m going through it right now, literally. Bill McKibben: And it’s for something that’s not dangerous. If there was an epidemic of solar panel fires on the rooftops of Australia, where 40% of people have these things, then you can be assured that Fox News would be running the pictures 24/7. Okay? I mean, it should not be harder. In most of the world, you just call up on a Monday and by Friday you have solar panels on your roof and they’re pushing out injury. An even more remarkable example is what we call balcony solar. This is for apartment dwellers who don’t have a rooftop. Across Europe in the last few years, millions of people, 3 million people in Germany have gone to the whatever they call Best Buy in Germany and picked up a solar panel that they can hang from their balcony with a standard plug coming off it that they plug into a socket in their wall. And it produces in many cases, 20% or 25% of the energy that they’re using.
That’s illegal every place in this country, except, except that progressive bastion in the state of Utah, where the legislature earlier this spring unanimously improved enabling legislation for balcony solar because as one libertarian senator rightly pointed out, why should the people of Frankfurt and Hamburg be able to enjoy this thing and not the good people of Provo and Salt Lake City?
And so now if you go on YouTube, there are a lot of videos of Utahans proudly hanging their solar panels off their balcony. We can make this stuff happen anyway. And if we do, it’ll be a beautiful progressive story about how change is still possible.
We kicked off Sun Day, sort of organizing for it with a great event at Old North Church in Boston a couple of months ago, presided over by Mayor Wu of Boston, who might be my candidate for the single most impressive public official in the United States of America. And it really was a reminder that there even amidst the horrors of the moment, there is stuff we can do.
So, Third Act, which I organized to get old people like me fully engaged in the fight on climate and democracy, we’ve been taking huge part in, you know, all the No King’s Day and everything else. In fact, in fact, earlier this week, Stephen Miller, of all people affirmed our good work by announcing that all the protesters in D.C. were just a bunch of elderly white hippies.
Chris Hayes: Yes, they’re 90. They need to go take a nap.
Bill McKibben: Yes, take a nap. Yes. So we felt very good about that. Our work has been recognized by the single most sociopathic person in our country. But they’re also one of the many groups that are key to the organization of this Sun Day because people do want something, this goes back to where we started, people do still want something good to work on too, you know.
I drew the title for this book, obviously, from George Harrison. And I was amused and happy to find when I checked it out on Spotify, that “Here Comes the Sun” is by far the most streamed song in the Beatles catalog, twice as many streams as “Hey Jude” or “Let It Be” or whatever. And I think the reason is just the deep and gentle optimism that it embodies. We’ve since gone on, we’ve put together a great playlist for Sun Day on Spotify with hundreds of songs about the sun. I mean, they’re just endless. The Beatles themselves have another couple of great songs, but so does everybody else.
Then, I dare you, put together your playlist of good songs about fracking. There’s something not just utilitarian, not just progressive, not just practical, not just economical, there’s something beautiful about this. And if we can capture that, then that’ll be, I mean, we need something beautiful. Chris Hayes: I mean, you could kind of tell the whole story, right, of the energy transition that we’re embodying here with the comparison of the song “16 Tons” and “Here Comes the Sun,” right? One is about hauling coal in the mine. What do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don’t you call me, I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store. The fact that fundamentally, the model of fossil fuel extraction from the jump has been a model of exploitation and abuse always. And, you know, tyranny and authoritarianism and control and a small set of people with vast resources that they use to sort of impose their will on everyone else.
And “Here Comes the Sun” is everyone on a beautiful spring day is getting an equal amount of sun in the area, right? Like, we’re all getting it.
Bill McKibben: Energy from heaven, not from hell, brother. That’s the mantra.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: You know, one of the meditations of the book is that, if you think about it at a deep level, right? Like, the only reason we’re here and that humans can exist is because of the sun and because of where we are situated to it. That the sort of Promethean moment of discovering fire was a moment where when the sun was away, right, all of a sudden, you can do all these things. You could also cook your food, which was massively important for our evolutionary development because it was more efficient to get calories that way. And that was able to, you know, give enough energy to these enormous brains that are just enormous energy sucks. And that we sort of reinvented that Promethean moment in the industrial revolution. We figured out you can actually burn all of this sort of stuff that’s been in the Earth for, you know, millions of years. To come back around to a world in which like we don’t have to light stuff on fire and we don’t have to burn things anymore because of this very elegant, fairly simple technology, which is the sunbeam hits the photovoltaic cell and it just shakes loose some of those electrons and that creates a current and you can run that current.
Bill McKibben: You know, I’m a sometime Methodist Sunday school teacher. The good Lord was kind enough to hang a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky. Who are we to waste it? That’s what I think.
Chris Hayes: Well, but part of it too, and this is the thing I’d really like to think about, and you talk about it in the book is, you know, there’s all this, there’s been this abundance versus, you know, austerity discourse and about degrowth and growth. And I think there’s been elements of the environmental movement that have been very connected with sort of vision of degrowth and back to the land and sort of there’s something fundamentally destructive and rapacious about the way that American and global civilization operates. But one of the things that I think is a possibility that I will see in my lifetime is a world of essentially like zero-cost marginal energy. That there’s just energy to do stuff and all kinds of interesting things might grow out of that, all sorts of awful things might grow out of that as well.
But that idea that this doesn’t have to be a scarce thing that people fight over. I mean, there was a time when information was a very scarce thing that people fought over and like who got to control the books, and then, you know, that doesn’t happen in the same way now. Like we’re going to, I think, move into a new era more quickly than we realize where this control by these small entities, whether they’re nation states, companies, or some combination is just going to go away.
Bill McKibben: You know, I think that the possible implications of all of this are enormous. I’m not going to live long enough to see all of them. I’d settle for us taking the steps now that kept us from actually destroying the planet on which we lived, and then letting the next generation of people figure out all the beautiful possibilities that come with it.
I think it’s worth saying that this could be, approached in the right spirit, the most beautiful kind of group project that we’ve undertaken in this country and in this world for a very long time. The last technological project of this scale, anything like this scale in our nation was the moonshot in the ‘60s, which actually was a kind of unifying thing amidst a very divisive, chaotic, violent moment in American history.
This is far more beautiful than that. It’s not about putting two guys on a different planet. It’s about bringing our local star down to Earth so we don’t have to destroy everything we’ve seen around us.
And it has such possible implications for equality and a certain kind of liberation that it, well, it just makes it possible for me when I wake up at three in the morning, as I do, worrying about right now the state of our, parlous state of our country and our democracy, the worst period by far of my lifetime, to at least comfort myself with the thought that there are, remain some possibilities for a fresh start on this Earth.
Chris Hayes: Bill McKibben is the legendary writer, author, environmentalist, activist. He’s the founder of 350.org and the Third Act, which focus on climate crisis and democracy. He’s the author of many books, including his latest, which we were just discussing, which I truly highly recommend. Please, I think you should go buy it and read it and soak up the sun and have that feeling of the hopeful first beautiful day of spring after a long winter. It’s called “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and A Fresh Chance for Civilization.” He’s organizing Sun Day, which is September 30th. Where can people learn more about that?
Bill McKibben: SunDay.Earth. SunDay.Earth. And it’s a gorgeous website.
Chris Hayes: SunDay.earth. Bill, thanks so much.
Bill McKibben: Thank you, brother.
Chris Hayes: You can always email us at WITHpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads, Blue Sky and what used to be called Twitter. With the handle @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyishishappening.