Here Comes the Sun: How Solar Power Is Driving Climate Action and Protecting Democracy
Q&A with Bill McKibben
Credit: StoryWorkz
Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, and activist. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change and has appeared in 24 languages. He has gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize, as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He also helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas, and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat — Megophthalmidia mckibbeni — in his honor.
Keith Forman: Bill, I believe you are easily the hardest-working man in climate — but it's always this way with you: New Yorker columns, Substack posts, teaching, the book tour and interviews, and on top of all that, founding 350.org, Third Act, and now Sun Day.
Bill McKibben: Stop, you’re making me tired.
Forman: Let's start by talking about your book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization — the process and the timing. You wrote it during a rapidly changing period. Did you begin before the Biden/Trump election was decided? Was Jigar Shah still at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funding green and renewable projects?
McKibben: I actually started writing the book on or about New Year's Day this year. I’d been researching it, obviously, for the previous couple years, but I was writing it very much in the shadow of Trump. Although I finished the book by the end of January, I was able to keep amending and revising it right up through June, so I was kind of tracking what was happening with the Trump administration, but also what was happening around the world, where this surge of solar deployment just kept picking up speed and momentum.
Forman: Unlike many of your previous books, which cover a range of topics connected by a central thesis, this one is laser-focused on a specific subject and plan of action. Why that choice now?
McKibben: I think this focus on solar energy is justified. This is the first time in the 40 years I've worked on climate that I’ve felt this way. Solar energy represents a serious, scalable response to the crisis we're in. I'm absolutely fascinated by it and determined to see how much we can achieve worldwide. So yes, very much a focus on this sudden, new, powerful thing.
It's not that it's going to solve the climate crisis — nothing will; it's too late to stop global warming. But this is the first thing with potential to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet ultimately gets. Every tenth of a degree is another 100 million people who move from a relatively safe climate zone to a dangerous one.
Forman: Not to mention animal and plant species that might avoid extinction. It's scalable — a word you've used when discussing solar power — and scalability is crucial. Not to put either of us in the coffin, but those of us of a certain age have to think about what can be achieved in our lifetime. We’ll see horrible things — things we love disappear — but this could be something on the positive side of the ledger.
McKibben: Exactly. We're already seeing it penetrate energy systems around the world. The relevant timeframe, I think, is the next four or five years — how fast this goes. And it's fascinating to watch. China has clearly made a deep commitment to this and sees it as its ticket to world legitimacy and power. The Trump administration has made a deep commitment to stopping it — they see that as crucial to the triumph of their worldview.
Forman: Like any good work of nonfiction — persuasive and educational — you cite a lot of expert material, giving attributional credit, of course. I just love going down some of those rabbit holes. For instance, I bought an antique copy of Children of the Sun by Alfred W. Crosby. Mark Jacobson from Stanford is a superstar that you introduced me to in this book. The Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge from the DOE was another fascinating insight. Then there’s Making Sense of Chaos by J. Doyne Farmer, The Sun Has Won research by Rob Carlson, and the climate journalists at The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal you reference. Do you have a favorite among those sources?
McKibben: I don't know if I have a favorite among those sources, but Mark Jacobson deserves enormous credit for having predicted the economic viability of solar, and with that prediction, enabled a lot of this progress. And in the face of much ridicule and so on, he kept his eye focused on the basic economics and physics of energy production and, I think, has been completely vindicated.
There are many great heroes in this story, many of them anonymous engineers along the way, because this has been an iterative process. Jigar Shah, whom you mentioned earlier, is another enormous hero, driving progress for the last 4 years as fast as he could. And to the extent that America has any real presence in this fight, it's in no small part due to him.
Forman: Agreed. You know, as I read the first 70 pages or so of the book, I found myself thinking, “Wait a minute, there's too much optimism here. I know Bill McKibben. What have you done with him?”
McKibben: Obviously, it’s been a long and painful road to how deep the climate crisis now is. This is the world I hoped to stave off through writing, organizing, and activism — and I failed at that. We're now in a very desperate place. There's not much to be gained reiterating any of that.
And of course, now in America in particular, we're watching our democracy flicker and falter. That makes it all the darker and harder to fight — and even more important to fight. As you know from reading the book, I sense that the rise of clean, renewable, local energy has a role not just in the climate fight, but also in the fight against authoritarianism.
Forman: I can see that. To the extent that it increases access to energy and resultant improved quality of life, better channels of communication, and access to information, not just within the community, but access to the broader world — it supports democracy. With the caveat that one still needs to sort through that information carefully.
Let's talk about China. You describe it as potentially the world's first “Electro-State,” as opposed to the Petro-States that we've had for the past 75 years. Could this be a wake-up call for American Firsters who risk becoming American Lasters without action?
McKibben: You would think. If somehow Trump and his crew are able to keep up this assault on clean energy, in 10- or 15-years’ time, the U.S. could be at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis China. If tourists are then able to get visas to come here at all, they'll be coming to gawk at a kind of Colonial Williamsburg of fossil fuel — internal combustion cars, coal-fired plants, and relics of an older era.
I find it hard to believe that we can keep up this current assault on clean energy because it's also cheap energy. If we do, we risk becoming the world’s high-cost energy country — and putting everything in our economy at a tremendous disadvantage.
Forman: So there's a national security aspect to this as well. I believe about 40% of the ocean-borne cargoes are fossil-based commodities. This trade can be disrupted by all sorts of conflict or non-state actors, especially using drones.
McKibben: Now Trump, with his tariff policy, is trying to force other countries to buy our liquefied natural gas (LNG), which in the short run will have some success, but in the slightly longer run, I think it becomes clear to any ruler of any country that they do not want to be reliant on a country as fickle and erratic as the United States for their energy supplies. Any more than Europe any longer wants to be reliant on Vladimir Putin for theirs. I think that this volatility speeds up this surge toward solar and wind. And I think that that's a very good thing.
An interesting thought experiment is to just ask yourself how the geopolitics of the world would have been different over the last 70 years if oil had been of trivial value during that period — if we already ran on sun and wind. I think the answer is we would have had far fewer wars, coups, assassination plots, terrorist attacks. You know, humans are very good at fighting wars, but it's going to be hard to figure out how to fight one over the sunshine.
Forman: Exactly. We saw that dynamic in World War II — Japan going after Indonesia and Malaysia, and Hitler moving east to the Ploesti fields in Romania and Baku in Russia, rather than focusing on Western Europe.
Returning to China for a moment — with respect to their avid pursuit of solar, I just think of tipping points. One may have come during preparations for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. We were wary of the smog we could see on our TVs in the months preceding the event, and the daily reports on air quality. I wonder if we in the United States might have our own attributional tipping point. There’s the work of Frederike Otto, and ongoing research by many groups analyzing the tragic Texas floods and the Los Angeles fires. Could these 2025 events be our tipping point?
McKibben: I don't know. In this country our information systems are broken and poisoned. And it makes things extremely, extremely difficult. Reason is having a tough time of it at the moment. Eventually, people will have no choice but to figure out what's going on, but “eventually” doesn't help us all that much — it will be too late. We have to move now, and rapidly. I hate to say this, but it's probably a good thing that America, at this point, only accounts for 11% of global emissions, because my sense is that much of the rest of the world is acting somewhat more rationally than we are.
Forman: Agreed. In my travels I see this firsthand. This is not anecdotal evidence. You do a great job in the first 30 pages of the book detailing the rapid fall in solar prices and adaptation worldwide, specifically the hard costs, then soft costs of solar. Why is solar still called “alternative energy” and considered a luxury item by many?
McKibben: I think because we've stuck it in that file in our minds for a long time, and that's sticky. It takes a while to get past that. And I think it's also because, there's a huge industry with a vested interest in insisting that it's so. Look at Donald Trump, as a candidate, who essentially said to the fossil fuel industry, “Give me a billion dollars, and you can have anything you want.” They gave him about half a billion dollars — that was enough. One of the things that he's been willing to supply is a steady stream of nonsense. “Wind energy is the most expensive energy in the world”, he says, when in fact it's just about the cheapest after solar power. “Wind energy causes cancer. Solar kills.” A long riff about solar arrays killing rabbits.
In a country as polarized and information-poisoned as ours, it's very hard to overcome that kind of megaphone.
Forman: If you talk to many legacy fossil energy advocates, if I say the words “solar energy,” before I even get the R fully rolled out, the word “intermittency” comes out of their mouths. A very knee-jerk reaction.
McKibben: Which, at this point, is a silly argument, because batteries have come down in price just as fast as they have for solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Reliability Council of Texas, their grid regulator, said this summer that Texas no longer really faces any danger of a blackout because they've put so much renewable energy and associated energy storage on their grid. You're no longer in terror that a coal-fired power plant's going to trip off and bring down the grid — or that gas wellheads will freeze and shut natural gas power facilities.
Forman: May I suggest that there may be other bad actors — some utility companies and Public Utility Commissions. Virginia just this year legalized distributed power after a prolonged fight. The ability to co-locate solar or to set up a distributed power grid in your community could be a magic bullet to avoid power grid gridlock and to mitigate the need for new large power plants to meet incremental load growth.
McKibben: Utilities are extraordinarily status-quo institutions, and they've been protected for many years because of the sheer boringness that surrounds utility policy. The technical aspects of rate making can be very difficult stuff to grasp.
At Third Act, we've been quite successful in training up teams of people in state after state to go sit in and watch at public utility commission meetings and to testify. And they're some of the first average citizens, non-utility lobbyists, ever to have been willing to do that. And it's been a very useful step — a strategy we will continue to deploy.
Forman: That could be critical as we look to expand the solar model. It must have been a relief to discuss the advantages of solar and its cost-effectiveness without having to discuss pricing negative externalities of fossil fuels and enumerating the subsidies the fossil fuel industry still receives in the form of accounting rules, our tax code, cheap access to public lands, preferred water access and disposal rights, etc.
McKibben: Yeah, it's very true. I mean, I think it's a point not to be overlooked that the first 35 years of the climate fight was fought in a world where fossil fuel was cheap and renewable energy expensive. So we needed to drive up the price of fossil fuel — carbon taxes, or divestment, or whatever — and we needed to constantly be making what should have been the obvious case that there are huge costs associated with melting down the planet that we live on. But those arguments are abstract and hard. It’s much easier to be able to say, look, even without all those obvious truths, we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
Forman: I love the example of Pakistan you write about, and I think of the two-stroke engines that you see, hear, and smell in Lahore, and eventually having those go quiet and smokeless through electrification. I just looked at the stock price of Ather Energy, an electric scooter manufacturer in India, and its stock price is up over 50% since the publication date of this book.
McKibben: India faces the same challenge that China did 10 years ago. Cities are becoming almost impossible to live in, and that creates, among other things, a crisis of political legitimacy for people like Modi, as it did for the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, that was one of the big reasons that they unleashed this torrent of innovation. In India, you see the streets of New Delhi filling with electric rickshaws. China has been successful in the past five years of causing Beijing to fall from the list of top ten smoggiest cities in the world. This could be the future of New Delhi as well. I haven't been to China in a little while, but friends tell me that, among other things, they're noticeably quieter now because so much of the traffic is electric cars.
Forman: Let’s transition to the topic you touch on of impediments to change and that they’re not always the usual suspects. Some of the friction comes from advocates for labor, NIMBY issues arising in affluent blue districts, the recent California law making rooftop solar more difficult to install, the Biden administration prohibiting the importation of low-priced electric vehicles (EVs) from China, land use conservationists, and strategic mineral extraction opposition.
McKibben: Yeah, I mean, let's be clear, the main bad actors here are the fossil fuel industry and the resurgent right that supports them. But yes, everyone defends their piece of the status quo turf. It's completely understandable that autoworkers, for instance, do oppose the importation of Chinese EVs. But everyone does need to grapple with the reality of the world that we're living in. Both the reality of the climate crisis and the reality that there's a new technology disruptive in town, and we better figure out how not to try and shut it off. That's not going to work in the long run — or even the medium run. We better work to figure out how to make it work for us, which in the larger context it will. It's clearly very good news for almost everyone that we could have a clean and cheap supply of electricity. And, you know, for the few incumbents for whom that's trouble — for workers in certain industries — then we need to help them transition. And if they're just people who own oil wells, then we need to try and beat them.
Forman: I was thinking of the agrivoltaics discussion you write about. I've seen it in action in Alabama, and it's amazing, with the cows grazing, and the crops even growing under some of these solar panels, which let photosynthesizing light through them.
McKibben: This is one of these places where it's really fun to think about human creativity being unleashed. A way to think about a solar farm is that beyond producing electricity, it also produces shade, which is an increasingly valuable commodity on an overheating planet. Shade helps you retain moisture in the soil, and on and on. So even in deserts, where there's been understandable unease about whether this will disrupt biology, scientists are finding that the biotic crusts on the top of deserts are growing much more quickly than when exposed directly to this new, hotter climate.
Forman: Let’s transition to your other wheelhouse, actions and activism, and talk about Sun Day which was on September 21, 2025.
McKibben: Sun Day turned out to be a triumph. There were about 500 events or so spread across the country, and you can get a sense of it from this New York Times article. The actions across the country had really two baskets of intention. The first basket is the one that we've already discussed — and it's probably most important — to help drive this new narrative that this is no longer “alternative” energy, but the obvious, common-sense, straightforward way to the future. The second basket of intentions is to make it easier for people to adopt it.
We obviously can't pass laws in Washington right now, so that's off the table. But that doesn't mean we can't do a lot of things at the state and local level to change this story and outcomes. That's especially clear when you look at distributed solar at home, both rooftop and in some apartments. These can be much more expensive in this country versus other jurisdictions — not because of the cost of panels (though tariffs don’t help) — but mostly because we have this very cumbersome permitting procedures: 15,000 municipalities, each with their own set of laws and rules. Those procedures are getting easier to navigate. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory produced an app called the Solar App Plus, which they spun off into a non-profit — SolarAPP+. It allows instantaneous permitting once a contractor has typed in what kind of equipment they're installing and at what address; if it checks out with the app, they get their permit. California, New Jersey, and Maryland have mandated its use, leaving 47 states to go.
For people who don't have their own roofs, i.e., apartment dwellers, the obvious thing to do is to emulate what's happened in Europe over the last two years with the rapid spread of balcony solar. Millions of Europeans have gone to whatever their equivalent of Best Buy is, plunked down a few hundred euros, and come home with a solar panel designed not to be connected to the roof, but hung from the railing of their apartment balcony. It comes with a standard plug that you can plug into the wall — no electrician needed. Simple. In return, it often provides 20-25% of the household’s electrical needs. Now that's illegal everywhere in this country except the state of Utah. That progressive state’s legislature unanimously passed enabling legislation earlier this year. They did it because a Libertarian state senator, who I've talked to — an interesting guy — just said, “If the people of Stuttgart can have this, why not the people of Provo?” And now they do. There are lots of videos on YouTube of happy Utahns installing their solar panels on the balconies of their apartments.
In the ten days since Sun Day, we’ve seen legislation for balcony solar introduced in half a dozen states, and we’re working hard on permitting reforms at city halls across the country. We can do that in lots of places, and as this example makes clear, not in just blue states and blue cities, but red ones too. Very useful to remember that the fastest growing clean energy state in America is Texas.
Forman: Achieving progress, as we see with Sun Day, often requires people to step up and take action — sometimes at personal risk. In your last book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon, you spoke forcefully about the veracity of actions one could take, and you mentioned your own experiences with peaceful civil disobedience — handcuffs, jail cells, and dealing with the legal system. The emphasis here is, of course, on always peaceful protests.
But I wonder if you see us approaching the point that Timothy Snyder describes in On Tyranny, where defending democracy may carry the risk of physical harm. One might have to stand in front of a truncheon, baton, or rubber bullet — hopefully rubber. We’ve already seen some of this manifest in enforcement actions conducted by ICE.
McKibben: Yeah, look, our democracy is under threat. This is not a world that I pretend to understand, because it's not like anything that you or I have ever lived through in this country. And I'd say there's a perfectly reasonable chance that at some point, people like me will be rounded up and sent to jail — or whatever, they're into at that point. I don't know how to prevent that. It scares me. I'm not particularly brave. But we come out of a tradition of adherence to fact and reason, and to liberty.
As you know, I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. I gave tours of the Battle Green as my summer job, telling the story of the beginning of the American Revolution — a story that I am very fond of. That, in a small country, people decided that they would try and shake off kings and autocrats and replace it with the rule of citizens. That's an extraordinary experiment. If its time has run out after 250 years, well, I guess we'll find out — but we will have to do what we can to try and prevent it. And I think that one of the important ways to do that is with the rapid spread of locally available energy. One of the things that empowers autocrats, in many cases, is their control of the energy supplies on which we depend.
Fossil fuels are only available in a few places. Those who control them become much stronger and richer than they should be. And as a result, there's something deeply important and subversive about a trend toward energy that can be produced anywhere by anyone. And that's, I think, felt as strongly by people who are instinctually conservative as by people who are instinctually progressive. I've lived in rural America my whole adult life — red states as well as blue. I have many Trumpy neighbors with their Trump flags, and a surprising number of those have solar panels on their roofs, or in their fields. The attitude being, “My home is my castle,” and if I control the energy supply to my castle, then it's a much more independent little fiefdom.
Forman: Everybody with a survivalist bunker should have solar — it just goes without saying. This is disturbing to me. I've sensed its presence. You may not see it at Middlebury, but I’ve seen increasing evidence on college campuses that climate change is being treated as a political issue — and therefore, under the guise of “institutional neutrality,” universities will not take a position on climate change, as the issue is deemed political rather than scientific.
McKibben: Well, that's of course particularly sad, because it's at American universities that we really unraveled the climate puzzle. This is one of the crown jewels of American scientific research. It was Scripps Institute in California that dispatched Charles Keeling in 1959 to put the CO2 sensor on Mauna Loa — that's almost certainly the most important scientific instrument in history — an instrument that the Trump administration is now trying to disconnect.
Understanding the climate has been a great and fascinating challenge for academia, because it requires a cross-disciplinary focus. Yes, you need to understand physics and chemistry — but at the moment, that's fairly well understood. You also need to understand economics, political science, sociology, psychology, theology, and on and on and on. This discipline has been a wonderful way for universities to knock down some of the silos on campus.
Forman: I always like to emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary studies — and that we need both right-brained and left-brained people to work this field. We need some of those left-brained people to help explain it to the TikTok audience, for instance. Everybody can have an oar in the water — that’s my terminology — moving our efforts forward in common direction, albeit on different courses and at different speeds.
McKibben: Absolutely, and arts and humanities are a deep and important part of this. And truthfully, it's one of the reasons I'm so excited about this solar stuff. I think it connects deeply with people's spiritual side — sometimes an overused word — perhaps their humanity, their planet, and their place on it. I don't think that there is a human being alive who doesn't smile or grin when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and hits their shoulders. I obviously took inspiration for the title of my book from George Harrison and was happy to find, when I went to Spotify, that Here Comes the Sun is by far the most streamed song in the Beatles' vast catalog — twice as often as Let It Be, or Hey Jude. And I think it's just because, especially in a dark time like our own, people connect deeply with that gentle and optimistic sense that the future could be different.
Forman: Just like the two times a year in Manhattan — the special crosstown sunsets that draw people into the middle of the streets, stopping traffic.
McKibben: Sunhenge, yes.
Forman: And the eclipse last spring across New England — another spiritual moment with the sun.
McKibben: A remarkable occasion. Everyone was in a good mood, and everyone was looking up.
Forman: Seeing people look up together like that gives me hope — but it also reminds me how fragile all of this feels. I have my own list of biggest fears — recession, the Greenpeace ruling in North Dakota, potential loss of 501(c)(3) status for groups working on climate in the NGO space, not just leveling the playing field by eliminating green energy subsidies but perversely taxing green energy entities and investment. These are all possibilities. What's your biggest fear right now?
McKibben: They all fall under the category of autocratic rule that doesn't pay any attention to law or custom. And, you know, we're finding out that our Constitution was not equipped to prevent this kind of full-on assault — that it relied more on a series of norms and conventions than we'd understood. And when those norms are just overwhelmed by someone like Donald Trump, then there is no safe harbor or refuge.
Forman: We talked about an interdisciplinary perspective in confronting the climate crisis, but there is an interdependence between climate health and the health of our democratic institutions. Any hopeful signs? I have one I'll share. I attended the AGU (American Geologic Union) annual meeting last December. Over the five-day event, there were reportedly over 13,000 posters (climate projects) in the poster hall, many of them presented by international students. My takeaway is that not one person or one government can stand in the way of this intellectual horsepower. This effort does not end if the U.S. abrogates its leadership role in climate science.
McKibben: I think you're right. And I will supplement it with the power of old people. The work we're doing at Third Act has been remarkably gratifying to me — to see a generation of older Americans willing to stand up for the future. In three years, we've assembled about 100,000 Americans over the age of 60, and they're doing fantastic work — backing up young people. So it's going to take generations working together. I think it’s the one trap to avoid — not that you’ve fallen into it — but this is not a problem for my generation to leave to the next to solve. We have a deep, deep, debt to pay. We have an obligation to help be a big part of this fight — to back up those young people.
Forman: Let’s talk about self-preservation. How does one navigate these times? Often, the last thoughts I have at night are climate related. Something may have happened that day, or I’ve overheard something. I awake in the morning, and there’s a whole new trauma to address. Do we have to become detached to survive — to retain our edge, to keep our sanity?
McKibben: In a sense, yes. I think that the tactical question you raise is a really important one, and for me, that's why this focus now on solar energy is so useful. It's large enough to be a game changer in many ways, and I don't think anything else is large enough now — or really on the horizon. I think this is the terrain on which we're fighting for the next while, and I think it's a good terrain to fight on. We have a clean and cheap way to produce the most important commodity — aside from food — in the world. That should help us in all kinds of ways. One way of saying it is, I think it's important that we play defense against every single outrage that emerges, but I also think that if that's all we're doing, it's a bit of a trap. The job is to play some offense, too — and here's a place to play some serious offense.
Forman: Bill, thank you for that last answer. It’s not that simple anymore. We’ve got to take these steps in our own lives and lead by example. We need to advocate for systemic change and help share what we’ve learned — how we acquired that power source, how easy it was to get, what local tax incentives or financing options were available. Can renters access solar power? Our readers have the chance to be active participants — to take the oar and move this effort forward.
McKibben: Absolutely. This has been a real pleasure to have this conversation.
About the Author:
Keith Forman is a 2020 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow with over four decades of experience in leadership positions in the energy industry. He currently serves as the Chairman of Capital Clean Energy Carriers, a shipping company based in Greece. Over the years, he has advised global infrastructure and private equity funds on midstream energy investments, served as the CEO for renewable energy companies, and held positions as a senior financial executive in large midstream energy companies.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.