Our last, best chance to cool the Earth | Bill McKibben

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Most of what we hear about climate change is worrying and often bleak. But every once in a while, some good news comes along. And when it comes to energy, this could be one of the more hopeful moments in human history. Author, educator and activist Bill McKibben has been thinking about climate change for decades. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, is widely considered the first book on climate change written for a general audience. I have been reading his work for years, and for most of that time, the news and Bill's writing has been pretty grim.

0:46Our fight to save the planet is an uphill one. So it means something that today Bill's hopeful, and that hope rests on a single, almost deceptively simple, fact. Earlier this decade, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun than from burning coal and gas and oil. Let me repeat, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. In his talk, Bill argues that solar and wind are no longer the expensive, idealistic alternative. They're simply the best and cheapest way to make power. He thinks we've been slow to notice the scale of this shift, in part because of the words we use to categorize it as alternative energy.

1:33He shows why solar power is our last best chance to cool the Earth, if we're willing to reach for it. And stick around after the talk. I got to sit down with Bill to go beyond the ideas he shared on stage, including why he thinks solar power is a form of solidarity, why he thinks recent wars have actually sped up the clean energy shift, and what he tells people who ask where they should move to stay safe from climate change. The place that you want to be is the place with good neighbors. Neighbors have been optional for the last hundred years in the Western world, but they're not going to be optional for the next hundred years.

2:09And just a quick note before we jump in. When I sat down with Bill in April after his talk, only Utah, Virginia, and Maine had passed plug-in solar legislation, which is mentioned in his talk and conversation. But since then, Vermont, Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, and New Hampshire have signed similar legislation into law. New York and New Jersey have passed legislation that are currently waiting on signatures from their governors. His talk and our conversation are coming up after a short break.

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5:13And now our TED Talk and conversation of the day. The Earth is producing about a third more power from the sun this spring than last. That solar power is suddenly so cheap and abundant that Australians will soon get three hours of electricity free every afternoon. Free! After 400 ,000 years of working hard for energy, from gathering firewood to paying the power bill, some humans will suddenly have access to this commodity for nothing. California, fourth largest economy in the world, now produces most days more than 100 % of its electricity from renewable energy. At night, when the sun goes down, big new batteries on the grid turn dark into daylight.

6:06In Pakistan, peasant farmers who used to pay through the nose for diesel power to run their irrigation pumps are using 30 % less of the fuel than they were two years ago, in large part because they've imported millions of cheap Chinese solar panels and gone on YouTube to figure out how to connect them up. They often lack the money to build the steel scaffolding we're used to seeing at solar farms, no matter. They just lay them on the ground and point them at the sun. In a world where many, many big things have taken a very dark turn this decade, this is the one big thing that is going right. We have quite suddenly the opportunity to build a clean, abundant future if we simply seize it, but most of us don't recognize how huge this moment is.

7:05In part, that's because we've spent decades calling this stuff alternative energy, and it's blinded us to the fact that it's now the obvious, common-sense, straightforward way to power the future. Roughly 90 % of new electric generation around the world last year came from the sun and the wind. And that, in turn, is because earlier this decade, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun than from burning coal and gas and oil. Let me repeat, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

7:52If we can keep the staggering growth of the last 36 months going, then we could enter an extraordinary new age. Consider, eight or nine million people a year die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's one death in five on this planet. But the Chinese cities, whose air was so foul a few years ago that you couldn't see across the street, are suddenly much cleaner. Most of the cars sold there now come with a plug, and it connects them to the vast solar and wind farms that the Chinese are building faster than anyone on Earth. More fundamentally, this energy transition is our only real chance of even starting to catch up with the physics of climate change.

8:38It's too late to stop global warming. But it's not too late to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets, and each tenth of a degree that we raise the temperature moves 100 million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a more perilous one. This new age would come with one other great bonus. Unlike fossil fuels, which are concentrated in a few places, the sun's energy is available everywhere. Instead of, say, attacking Venezuela to secure its oil or threatening to cut off Europe's gas supply to force the subjugation of Ukraine, we get to imagine a world where hydrocarbons no longer equal wealth and power.

9:25Imagine how many fewer wars and coups and terrorist plots we would have seen in the last century if oil had been of trivial value. As this spring has reminded us, humans are all too good at starting wars, but even for us, figuring out how to fight one over sunshine will be tricky. Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.

10:01So what good news? Unless, of course, you own an oil well or a coal mine. Then the rise of clean energy becomes an extraordinary threat, one that mobilizes you to fight back. In the U.S., for instance, candidate Trump told the oil industry that if they donated huge sums, he would have their back. In his first year in office, he shut down huge wind farms off the eastern seaboard, killed solar farms across the country. Now, Trump can't stop clean energy single-handedly. It's not like he's Jesus or something.

10:43Indeed, the economics are so favorable that even in the U.S., most new electric generation last year came from the sun and the wind. And the biggest growth was in the state of Texas, the home ground of big oil. But Trump and Russia and Saudi Arabia and a handful of other world powers may be able to slow that shift. America's Secretary of Energy, against all global evidence, has said there's no climate crisis and we're not in the middle of an energy transition either. So he's been subsidizing coal instead of embracing the clean energy that would, say, let us build any data centers we actually needed quickly and cheaply.

11:27As the Chinese have amply demonstrated, solar fields can sprout in a matter of weeks. America's effort to delay this transition is not just economically stupid, it also endangers the last best hope of cooling this Earth. Sure, in 40 years, we will run the planet on sun and wind because it's cheap, but if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet. So those of us who hope for a different future need to fight for it, and with the cheap solar panel, we finally have a real weapon in that struggle. We need to push in every country and at every level of government for a faster move toward cheap, clean power.

12:12We started Sunday in the U.S. last year on the autumnal equinox. Across the nation, 500 events, from solar-powered concerts to the installation of solar panels on Habitat for Humanity homes, helped spread this new energy gospel. We'll do it again on the summer solstice in 2027, and this time we will do it globally. Days like this help us build the political power we need to push these things ahead. Americans, for instance, right now, pay three times what Europeans or Australians pay for solar power, mostly because of unnecessary bureaucracy at the state and local level. So free the rooftop is a cry that appeals to conservatives as much as liberals.

13:01Utah became the first American state last year to legalize small-scale plug-in solar, opening the door for the kind of simple installations that have sprouted on the balconies of millions of European apartments in the last three years. Maine and Virginia joined Utah last week. So yeah, as we push ahead with this work, we need to talk about its scientific necessity and its economic pragmatism, but we have one other ace to play, and that's the sheer beauty of power from the sun. and we have a deep human connection to our local star. We don't know for sure how prehistoric people thought about things, because being prehistoric, they failed to write it down.

13:46But we do know that every pile of rocks they left behind, like Stonehenge, seems to point to the equinox or the solstice. Do you not break into an involuntary grin when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and hits you on the shoulder blades? if you don't get enough sun, you literally can get sad, seasonal affective disorder. So the mantra for this moment is clear. Energy from heaven, not from hell.

14:24And with that slogan, what a breakthrough moment this could be. I mean, humans have been burning things since the dawn of time. Darwin said language and fire were the two things that set our species apart. And fire was mostly good. We learned to cook, which gave us the big brain. We could move north and south from the equator. The anthropologists even think that eons of standing around the campfire every night help explain some of the social bonds that mark our species. Think of it as a sort of primitive TED talk. When we learned to control the combustion of coal and oil and gas, That was the Industrial Revolution, and it gave us modernity.

15:07But now the cost of those fires has simply grown too high. The very future of the climate on which we depend is being overwhelmed by their smoke. So what sweet relief that in this exact moment we can, if we want, put out those fires. The big ones in our power plants, the smaller ones in our furnaces and under the hoods of our cars. the sun already gives us light and warmth and via photosynthesis our supper. Now it is willing to provide us with all the power we could ever need. This gift has come at the last possible moment. It would be an extraordinary sin to waste it, and it would be a beautiful, beautiful project for humans to build it out across our hot and tired earth in the next few years.

16:03In advance of your participation in that fight, let me just say thank you.

16:17That was Bill McKibben. Coming up after the break, we discuss what cheap solar means for the balance of power around the world, why we can't fix this one household at a time, and where he finds hope heading into what he expects to be a rough few years of weather.

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17:55Bill, congrats on your TED Talk. Well, thank you. It was a great pleasure. How are you feeling now that you're off the stage? Well, you know, there's an audience filled with people who clearly are committed to changing the world. So what a pleasure to get to talk with them. You published The End of Nature in 1989, so nearly 40 years ago, which a lot of people know of or describe as the first book about climate change for a general audience. For much of the last 36 years now, the economics of clean energy have been against you. What was it like to carry that fight when the numbers didn't help? Well, you're absolutely right.

18:38The first four-fifths of the climate fight have been spent in a world where fossil fuel is cheap and renewable energy is relatively expensive. And so the work all those years in many ways was to make fossil fuel more expensive in a sense. That's what carbon taxes were about. It's why we worked so hard in these huge divestment campaigns to raise their cost of capital. It's why we tried to stop many of the pipelines and things to sort of keep the industry from consolidating its hold. Those things are all important still. But now the force of economic gravity is pulling in the right direction. And that's a huge help.

19:18At this point, the fossil fuel industry is on the back foot. They're having to contend with reality. And their only tool really is spending huge amounts of money to game the political system to prevent having to come to terms with that new reality. What has the shift been like for you as somebody who speaks and talks about these things? Because your newest book and your talk really have kind of a hopeful lens compared to your earlier work. I mean, it's obviously hope tinged with great sadness because we've waited too long and much of the – I mean, horrible damage has been done and far more will be.

19:57And it's not clear that we'll be able to really arrest climate change in a serious way at this point. The physical momentum is strong. But we finally have a weapon in this fight. And every tenth of a degree that we can shave off how hot the planet eventually gets, we'll keep, by best academic estimate, about 100 million people in a safe climate zone. Every tenth of a degree that the temperature goes up moves 100 million people from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one. What's the difference between a safe climate zone and a dangerous one? I mean, it's, you know, we're now having large parts of the world around the equator where it's just getting too hot for people to be able to work outdoors.

20:43You know, the human body is a magnificent machine, but it has tolerances. And past a certain point, if it's, you know, 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity is high and stuff, you just can't keep working in the field. It doesn't, it's impossible. So that's the basic condition. But of course, there's lots of other places where we're turning things to desert, where we're flooding places as sea level rises, where so much stuff is caught on fire that nobody can go live there again. I mean, there's a lot of that already and there's going to be a lot more. We'll see some of that in the next year because it looks like we're about to have a big, big El Nino on this planet.

21:31That'll drive the temperature higher than it's ever been in our planet and human history because it keeps just building on the global warming that we've already accomplished. So, you know, it's going to be an interesting 18 months. Wow. Wow. Back to your talk, it seems like you're saying that we're essentially, we have a branding problem when we call renewable energy alternative because then fossil fuels are default or normal. How do we fix this branding problem? Well, I think we talk about it a lot and in ways that people can understand. I often say that we're used to thinking of solar power sort of the way we think of Whole Foods, you know, the supermarket.

22:13Yeah. It's like nice but pricey for special people, you know, when in fact solar power and wind power are now the Costco of energy. This is the stuff that's cheap, available, in bulk, on the shelf, ready to go. And as people start to understand that, their receptivity changes dramatically. And sadly, it also gets easier the more that our leaders do really stupid things like launch pointless wars in the Middle East around the world. People are showing up in huge numbers in the last little while in EV showrooms and calling their contractor to find out about heat pumps and trying hard to move to electricity off fossil fuel.

23:00You've written that you see solar as a form of solidarity. What do you mean by that? Well, the way that things work now, as long as you depend on fossil fuel, it's only available in a few places. So it contributes very naturally to the kind of oligarchies and hierarchies in our world. I mean, the very first oligarch was John D. Rockefeller because he was the first guy to figure out that if you could control the supply of this necessary thing, then you were sitting in the catbird seat. Solar, by contrast, allows everybody to take control of their energy destiny and beautifully works better the closer you get to the equator.

23:44Those are the people most well positioned to take charge of this. There's plenty for everybody. And at higher latitudes, wind is the perfect complement to solar. It's really just another form of solar energy since the sun heats the earth differentially, producing the breezes that turn those majestic turbines. But the idea that the global south would no longer have to depend on somebody else for their energy is the cost is staggering. India, now the most populated country on Earth, spends more than 5 % of its GDP importing fossil fuel, which is, you know, going to change because they have unlimited amounts of sunshine.

24:29And by contrast, its neighbor Pakistan has seen an incredible transition over the past few years, right? Pakistan, which has a border with China, has been able to import a gazillion solar panels cheaply. And it's not been really a government program there. It's individual Pakistanis fed up with expensive and unreliable electricity who have bought panels, gone on YouTube, watched how to put them together. We're talking about such an exciting energy transition going on. But at the same time, we're watching U.S. policymakers take huge steps backward in clean energy transitioning and then heavily subsidizing fossil fuels in order to make that artificially cheaper.

25:15How much does it matter that the U.S. is backtracking on the climate transition? So it matters a lot. It's not enough to destroy this transition. At this point, the U.S. is about 11 % of global emissions, so a big deal but not a decisive one. But America is also trying to prevent this transition in other countries. So, for instance, when the president imposed tariffs on places, you could get out of your tariffs if you agreed to buy a lot of U.S. liquefied natural gas. So Japan and the EU made promises along these lines to go do it. that role as kind of drug dealer to the planet is not a savory one.

25:59Truthfully, I think when we look back on this period, we will think that Trump's decision to go to war in Iran was one of the things that turned out to push the renewable revolution faster than almost anything else. Say more about that. Well, everybody in the course of a few weeks figured out that relying on a commodity that had to go through a 20-mile-wide channel of water was not something you wanted. And America's been saying, well, import the energy from us instead, Trump keeps telling everybody. But I don't think there's that many countries around the world who are eager to tie their future to Donald Trump's moods.

26:41So around the world, we've watched in the last six weeks as one statesman after another has said, you know, the president of Indonesia said, we're going to build 100 gigawatts of solar power by 2028. The president of South Korea said, I can't sleep at night because I'm figuring out how we're going to get enough energy. We're committed to our own self-sufficient clean energy going forward. Country after country are making it clear that this is the direction they're going to have to go in. So we could be witnessing as one of the externalities of war, this catalytic effect on solar. It's a kind of perfect storm.

27:18Because remember, this has happened twice now in this decade. The first was when Russia invaded Ukraine and gas supplies for especially Europe were cut off. And now this. And they coincide. I mean, 15 years ago, it wouldn't have mattered that much because there wasn't an affordable alternative. But now there's something better, cleaner, and cheaper. So it should be a no-brainer for countries to figure out that this is where they need to go. Just in the same way that 15 years ago when the price of gas went up, what could you do? But now what you can do is go buy an EV and people are crowding into EV showrooms around the world.

28:00The only exception, again, is the US where we've made it very, very difficult to do that. Again, it's the US cutting its own throat. The auto industry is clearly going to be owned by the Chinese within a few years. Yeah, yeah, those$12 ,000. $12 ,000 nifty cars. Right, electric cars. Both EVs and solar, of course, require batteries. And what you don't get into in your talk is this debate, right, around the infrastructure around solar that is also resource dependent in its own way. What needs to happen to support solar at scale? Well, I mean, we should say there's no such thing as a free launch, but there are definitely more expensive lunches and less expensive lunches.

28:43And this is in the latter category. You have to go, say, get some lithium to build a battery. So you have to go mine it somewhere, and we should do our best to mine it carefully and humanely. But once you mine it, then you put it in a battery where it sits doing its lithium thing. When the battery degrades, now we recycle it and get the lithium back out and start over again. When you go mine coal, what do you do with it? You burn it. You burn it the next day. And you have to go mine some more of the same amount the next day to keep your system going. There's no recycling it. It just turns into carbon dioxide and heats up the planet.

29:25So the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado did a study now 18 months ago, estimating that the total mining burden for the renewable battery transition by mid-century would be roughly equivalent to the amount of coal we mined last year on this planet. A fraction of what is mined when it comes to fossil fuels. So we're moving to a less resource-intensive paradigm. And one of the things about all this is that because the technology keeps improving, there's a kind of wildly virtuous circle that emerges. So I put solar panels all over my roof 25 years ago, back when they were pretty expensive. If you took down those solar panels now, and there's no need to because they're still working fine, but eventually if they degrade and we take them down, the materials that are in one of those solar panels, the silver and things, would work to make six new solar panels.

30:27Oh, interesting. So we can recycle them. That's how much better we've gotten in that quarter century. So theoretically, at a certain point, not that far in the future, this should become a kind of closed loop system. And I understand you are involved in a movement to get solar installed on US balconies. Is that right? Tell us more. So in Europe over the last three years, there's been this explosion of what they call balcony solar. You go to Ikea, plunk down a few hundred euros and you come home with a solar panel, not for your roof, but designed to be zip tied to the railing on your apartment balcony or just stuck in the ground or something.

31:05And on the back, there's just a plug that you just plug into your wall. And there's no need for an electrician or anything. So it's super cheap and super simple. Now, these are not huge systems. For an average apartment, they'll provide 25 % of the power that you use. So not everything, but not nothing either. They're, as I said, become wildly popular across Europe. They're illegal everywhere in the US, except the state of Utah. And now we've launched big fight to get that same law passed everywhere else. We've got it in about 28 state legislatures. And last week, both Virginia and Maine approved it.

31:45So by the end of the year, I think a good third of the country you'll be able to go do this. Very cool. And on this topic of policy and regulation, where do you see the biggest roadblocks right now? Well, I mean, the biggest roadblocks, obviously, D.C. They're doing horrible things. They're shutting down wind farms that are working. They're putting federal land off limits to solar panels. It's all just crazy obstruction in the service of the people who gave them large campaign donations. But since we can't affect that for the moment, we're fighting hard to elect new people so we can. But in the meantime, there's a lot that can be done at the state and local level.

32:26Americans pay three times what Europeans or Australians pay for rooftop solar. And it's not because the panels are more expensive. It's because we have way more regulation and bureaucracy. It takes months to put these things up. In the rest of the world, it's pretty much like buying a refrigerator. You just call somebody up. I want solar on the roof. By Wednesday, they're up there hammering. By Friday, you're connected up instead of the months-long saga that it is here. And that's why 40 % of homes in Australia, 35 or 40 % have solar panels on the roof, which is in turn why Australia is producing so much solar energy that beginning in June, they're going to start handing it out electricity free every afternoon for three hours.

33:13That's a huge shift. And think of the Americans who would enjoy profit from having some free electricity. We've been talking about the need for systems change, investment at scale. What's the role of the individual in this transition? What can we be doing individually or at our family level, you know, if we're getting behind you in this fight. Well, so individuals, of course, can do things in their own home, and they should, in their own community. I'm proud that I've got solar panels on the roof and happy they connect to an EV. But let's be clear, we're not going to solve this thing one Tesla at a time.

33:55Sure. The most important thing an individual can do always is be less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to reshape public policy. So we started, for instance, Third Act a few years ago that organizes old people like me, anyone over the age of 60. And we've got 120 ,000 Americans now engaged in this. The two things we organize around are protecting the climate and protecting democracy. And it turns out older people are fantastic at both these jobs. And so, you know, if you're of a certain age, tell your grandparents about us, send them our direction. There's lots of other groups that are doing the same kind of good organizing, young people at the Sunrise Movement and things like that.

34:42Those are some great examples of coalition building. What gives you hope as we head into this really difficult 18 months where the weather is going to be as unpredictable as ever. We're in for heavy weather the next year and probably the next century. But I do think that we can build with solar power in particular, both energy systems that produce less carbon and are also somewhat more resilient in the face of disruption of all kinds, be it war or hurricane or whatever. And I think that in the process, we bring things down to a slightly smaller scale that allows communities to strengthen. You know, I live in a small state in Vermont, only 600 ,000 of us.

35:36But we spend$2 billion a year importing fossil fuel into Vermont. We just write check to Texas or Saudi Arabia or something every month. So, you know, thinking about what it would mean to have that$2 billion close to home and thinking of the kind of community power that it builds. When people ask me, where should I move to be safe from global warming? I mean, which they often do. The answer is there is no place that's safe from global warming. Every place faces its own perils. The place that you want to be is the place with good neighbors. Neighbors have been optional for the last 100 years in the Western world, but they're not going to be optional for the next 100 years.

36:22You need communities around you. And that's why I'm in Vermont where I live. You know, I think it has a strong sense of community. But clearly there are lots of places like that. I mean, think about the beauty we saw in Minneapolis this winter as people came together to defend their neighbors, you know. That's the kind of community you want to be in because the same community that can stand up to ice can stand up to heat as well. Bill McKibben, thank you so much for sitting down with us and for all of your fantastic work. Well, thank you. What a good conversation and what a pleasure to be at TED and just be surrounded by people who are deeply engaged in what we need to be engaged in.

37:05We're so glad you're part of the family.

37:12That was Bill McKibben at TED 2026 and in conversation with me, Elise Hugh. The interview was recorded in April of 2026. And that's it for today. If you're curious about TED's curation guidelines, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team. This episode was mixed by Xander Adams, and the interview was recorded in Vancouver by Dave Pulmer and Rich Amos of Field Trip. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Martha Estefanos, Brian Green, Maria Alexa Kavanaugh, Maren Larson, Emma Taubner, Tonsika Sungmarnivam, and Lainey Lott.

37:57Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I will be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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