Here comes the sun! The solar energy revolution

0:00Bill McKibben:This is The Guardian.

0:07Bill McKibben:Today, the environmentalist Bill McKibben on how solar energy could save the planet.

0:20Bill McKibben:2025 has already seen record-breaking heatwaves in Europe, severe flooding in Pakistan and South Sudan, and deadly wildfires in Los Angeles, a series of disasters exacerbated by global heating. But during his address at the UN General Assembly in New York last week, President Trump presented an alternative view. Higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, this climate change, it's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Trump has long been a critic of climate science and policies aimed at transitioning the world to renewable energies like wind and solar. But in front of an audience of nations, many of whom are on the front line of the climate disaster, this was his most expansive criticism to date.

1:10Bill McKibben:I've been right about everything. And I'm telling you that if you don't get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. It can all feel like a dark picture. But beyond the politics, something astonishing is happening around the world.

1:29unknown host:This sudden, dramatic and largely unheralded upsurge over the last 36 months in clean energy from the sun and the wind and batteries. It's the fastest energy transition in world history.

1:44Bill McKibben:The acclaimed environmentalist Bill McKibben says there's a revolution of cheap green electricity that could come just in time to save our planet, even as politicians and lobbyists try to rein it in. From The Guardian, I'm Lucy Hoff. Today in Focus, the clean energy revolution and reasons to be hopeful.

2:10Bill McKibben:Bill McKibben, you're an environmentalist and a writer. It's wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

2:17unknown host:Very good to be with you, Lucy, and thank you for all your good work.

2:20Bill McKibben:Well, thank you. And your first book was called The End of Nature, but your latest deliberately shares its name with the optimistic Beatles song, Here Comes the Sun. What's it like for you to go from writing about doom to writing about hope?

2:35unknown host:What it's like is very strange at this moment in our history. Sadly, the things that I wrote about in the 1980s in The End of Nature, which was the first book for about what we now call the climate crisis, they were all coming true. Every day, we see the toll that an overheated planet is taking on us, heat waves like we've never seen before, even things like the jet stream and the Gulf Stream beginning to flicker and wobble as the temperature rises. And in my country, and to a lesser degree all around the world, we're seeing the flickering and faltering of democracy. So it is very odd at this moment to have the one piece of big, good news on planet Earth, big enough and good enough that I think it stands some chance of taking a bite out of both the climate and the authoritarianism crises.

3:32unknown host:And if we can keep it going, then we have not a solution to either climate change or authoritarianism, but we have maybe at least the beginnings of an escape route.

3:46Bill McKibben:And your book focuses on the importance of solar power within that infrastructure. Can you give me a summary of where we are as a planet right now in terms of our carbon emissions? And are we anywhere near on track? It sounds a somewhat gloomy picture from what you're saying.

4:01unknown host:We're on track right now to raise the temperature of the Earth three degrees Celsius. If that happens, it will be, if not hell, then of a similar temperature. That's just too much violent flux and chaos for the planet's physical systems to withstand. And the reason that that's happening, of course, is mostly the combustion of coal and gas and oil. And the reason that it's always been so hard to get off that track is because the thing that was causing the crisis, coal and gas and oil, was also the thing that powered the economy. About five years ago, we crossed an invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and wind.

4:46unknown host:Wind is just another form of solar power. The sun heats the earth differentially, creating those winds that turn those majestic turbines. Once we'd crossed that invisible line, then things really started to happen. Happened most dramatically in China, which has put up something like two thirds of the world's clean power. China over the last couple of years is emerging not as a petro state, but as the first electro state in the world's history. but happening dramatically in lots and lots of other places too, including in Britain where we learned to burn coal to begin with and which no longer has an operating coal-fired power plant as of last January.

5:32unknown host:This is a remarkable surge. The earth is generating a third more power from the sun this autumn than it did last. But it's not yet fast enough to catch up with the physics of global warming. For that, we need to continue and even accelerate this exponential growth around the world.

5:52Bill McKibben:And obviously, one of the scariest terms in everything that you're saying is this idea of the tipping point. It's something that we've explored in great detail at The Guardian. The moment where an entire ecosystem, a meteorological event, or the Earth's climate can be damaged irrevocably. That makes it impossible to undo. But in your book, you're talking about a positive tipping point, that of solar. First of all, give us a breakdown of the role that solar power currently plays in the generation of renewable energy at the moment.

6:22unknown host:Right now, sun, wind and batteries are supplying about 95 % of the new generating capacity added on the planet. Last year, even in the United States, that was the breakdown. In particular places, the numbers are staggering. In China in May, the Chinese were adding three gigawatts of solar power a day, a gigawatt being the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant. So they were putting up the solar panel equivalent of one of those every eight hours. In the United States, oddly, the place where this is progressing fastest at the moment is the state of Texas, which is also the world headquarters of the hydrocarbon industry.

7:05unknown host:But the economics and physics of renewable energy are so powerful that even there, it's surging and surging dramatically. Two or three days ago, the head of the grid regulating agency in Texas said, we're not having blackouts anymore like we've been having, and we won't, because now we have enough solar and batteries on this grid to stabilize it. But you also see this now happening in dramatic fashion in the developing world. Pakistan, which shares a long border with China, has imported so many solar panels. Well, I mean, the country has a kind of do-it-yourself solar revolution over the last 24 months.

7:46unknown host:It's just people going on TikTok and learning how to snap together solar panels. And they've built the equivalent of something like half the country's national electric grid over that period. It's astonishing to see. Across Pakistan, consumers are turning to solar energy to save money on skyrocketing electricity bills. Asim Ayyub Bhatt in Islamabad shelled out nearly$3 ,500 this summer for a rooftop solar electricity generation system. So this is a race at this point. We're not going to solve, stop, prevent global warming. It's way too late for that. But the numbers we're seeing out of places like China and Texas are the kind of numbers that allow us to at least dream about shaving tenths of a degree off how hot it gets.

8:38unknown host:And every tenth of a degree Celsius that we raise the temperature moves 100 million of our brothers and sisters from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one. So this is still the most important work that humans have ever engaged in.

8:53Bill McKibben:I mean, that's extraordinary, the idea of people going out and plugging solar panels into their homes in China and all over the world. But what other innovations have been going on to drive that boom?

9:05unknown host:The thing to remember is that solar and wind and batteries aren't like the energy that we're used to. They're not really a commodity in the same way that coal and oil and gas are. Yes, you have to mine some lithium and cobalt and things, and we should do that humanely. But the total volumes of that are minuscule compared to what we mine now. There was a study last year showing that all the minerals you need for the renewable battery transition by 2050 amounted to less than the volume of coal we mined last year on this planet. Because the energy in this case comes from the sun and the wind. We're just figuring out how to do it.

9:44unknown host:The other innovation over the last few years that really matters is the sudden sharp decline in the price of batteries, of energy storage of all kinds. So far, that's been mostly lithium ion batteries, but now we're diversifying in all kinds of ways. There were cars this year in China on the market with sodium ion batteries. Sodium is the sixth most common element in the Earth's crust. There are cities and towns, especially across the north, that have put up this year vast sand batteries. When the sun and wind are going, they put a lot of heat into these silos filled with sand. When the sun goes down or the wind drops, that heat is then converted back into the energy that they need.

10:33unknown host:So there are a million ingenious ways to do this. And that's the point. We're now, instead of a commodity, coal, oil, and gas, that can be stored and hoarded and, you know, so on. Now we have human ingenuity that liberates the absolutely endless wash of sunlight and breeze that bathes the earth every day.

11:04Bill McKibben:So in your language of a positive tipping point with solar, has that already happened? And if so, what does that look like?

11:10unknown host:If we lived in a world without a climate crisis, we probably at this point could just relax and let market economics do their thing. 30 years from now, we're going to run the world on sun and wind because it's so cheap. But eventually, you know, is not really an ally here. If it takes us 30 years to get there, the world that we run on sun and wind will be a broken world. So the job now for activists is to speed up that transition as fast as we can, to force the spring as it were. And that's why we do things like we just had this big last weekend sun day observance all across America, 500 events designed to make people understand that this is no longer alternative power, which is what we've been calling it for my entire life.

12:05unknown host:It's now the common sense, obvious, straightforward way to power the future. And the reason in the States, one way you can tell that is the incredible, insane opposition of the fossil fuel industry. They poured money into electing Donald Trump because he promised quite openly that for a billion dollars, he'd give them anything they wanted. They got about half a billion dollars together, all told, in the last election cycle. And that's obviously plenty because he's been doing things that are just insane. I mean, he shut down a 90 % complete wind farm off the coast of New England, just said, stop, work on it and go away.

12:46unknown host:When he was in the UK, He was doing his best to explain to the king and the prime minister that wind didn't work and they should close down the wind turbines that supply like a third of Britain's power and replace them with some nice drilling rigs out in the North Sea. I doubt that the prime minister will fall for this line from the president, but that's what we're dealing with in the States. We talk a lot about, you know, budget crises and deficit crises in lots of small African Caribbean nations and things all the time. Generally, that's because they have to come up with the money to pay for the next shipment of oil that's swinging at anchor in the harbor.

13:32unknown host:If they want to keep their economy going, they have no choice. Even big economies like India. India spends 5 % of its GDP just importing fossil fuel. Think of what that represents, all of which is no longer really necessary. You just go buy a bunch of cheap Chinese solar panels and then your supplier is the sun. That's a much more stable relationship than relying on Donald Trump to ship you oil and gas.

14:02Bill McKibben:Absolutely. So we've spoken about the enormous production of solar panels in China, but are there more surprising parts of the world which has also taken on the technology?

14:12unknown host:In much of Europe over the last three years, this technology called balcony solar has really taken hold. The Guardian's done some great reporting on it. There are millions and millions of apartments across Europe where people have just gone to their local electronics store, put down a few hundred euros and come home with a solar panel designed to be hung over the balcony. just has a standard plug on the back that you put into the wall, often supplies 20 % of the power that a household might use, something like that. Those are illegal everywhere in the United States, except the very deep red state of Utah, which earlier this year passed legislation allowing them to be used.

14:57unknown host:The libertarian Republican state senator who sponsored the law said, if this is good enough for the people of Stuttgart, why should it be denied the people of Salt Lake City? And no one had a good answer. And now there's lots of nice videos on YouTube of earnest Utahns putting up their balcony solar panels. In the last few weeks, we've seen similar laws introduced in lots of other places, Vermont and New Hampshire and New York and on and on. This was the stuff that Joe Biden was trying to foster with the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really the kind of catch up with China act in a lot of ways, trying to build lots of battery plants and so on.

15:40unknown host:And to some extent, to a large extent, it really worked. They got in two years, a lot of money out the door. And that explains the fact, say, that the largest solar panel factory in the Western Hemisphere is in Marjorie Taylor Greene's district in the state of Georgia.

15:57Bill McKibben:Oh, who would have thought?

15:59unknown host:Our most rabid right-wing politico, you know. That's why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out. It's why they've had to mobilize all the cash that they can to try and slow down this transition. But around the world, this is what's happening. And it's mostly happening on the back of Chinese technology. I think world historians will see the story of the last eight months as the U.S. ceding economic and technological primacy, and with it probably political leadership as well, to the Chinese, completely voluntarily and in very short order.

16:42Bill McKibben:You write in the book very strikingly that the first solar cell was produced in America in the 1950s. 50s.

16:57Bill McKibben:It's now, as you say, and as you've been describing so beautifully, it's got this very perplexing relationship with solar. Can this solar tipping point be stopped by Trump or by others? Or has that already run away, do you think, given how exciting it is proving?

17:12unknown host:I think around the world, impossible to stop, possible to slow down. And as I say, we can't tolerate it slowing down if we want to deal with the climate crisis. In the States, God knows. I mean, if Donald Trump somehow manages to keep a hold on our politics and economy for a decade, then I suppose, you know, the US will have become the kind of heritage society where, you know, the rest of the world will come to look at. how people did things in the olden times, the way they go tour castles in Britain and things. I don't think that will happen because I think at a certain point, it will be clear to everyone that you can't run an economy in the world where everybody else is using cheap energy and you're using expensive stuff.

18:00unknown host:But I don't pretend to understand Donald Trump anyway. So I'm not confident making any predictions about the US, but I'm pretty confident that across the world, this is the future.

18:12Bill McKibben:What about the wider geopolitical implications of this? Is Trump not handing the power over to China by failing to take up this opportunity?