Can Solar Energy Save Us?

No journalist has covered the history of the climate longer or better than Bill McKibben. In 1989, as a 27 -year -old editor at The New Yorker,, He published the first mass market book on the subject, The end of nature. Since then, he has brought back from the whole world, covering all aspects of the question – science, economics, politics, ethics – with production that other writers can not help with envy. He made his appeal part of fossil fuel leaders and their government and financial catalysts, but he has also paid special attention to scientists, activists and other civil society representatives who push for climate rupture.

Indeed, almost 20 years ago, McKibben did something that traditional journalists frowns: he himself became an activist. With some of his students at the Middlebury College of Vermont, he formed 350.org, a group named after the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide known to be compatible with civilization as we know it. When 350.org was founded in 2008, the earth’s atmosphere contained 385 parts per million CO2. Today, it’s 427 ppm – the highest in at least 3 million years and increases rapidly.

In his new book, Here is the sunMCKIBBEN wears both journalists and activists hats. Its main argument is that the sun’s rays, transformed into electricity, could always help humanity escape the worst climate change. It will not be easy, but passing fossil fuels with solar energy fairly quickly “to stay on something like a survivable path” is “on the bleeding edge of the technically possible”.

The path, said scientists, requires half the emissions in the next five years. This could happen, suggests McKibben, due to an economic development that changes the situation but underestimated. “In the early 2020s,” he wrote, civilization “crossed an invisible line where the cost of energy production from the sun fell below the cost of the fossil fuel. [the solar revolution] Take place in China “, but it makes a rapid and global climb of fossil fuels not only technically possible but economically advantageous.

But if the economy now promotes solar energy, politics remains an imposing challenge. The interests rooted behind the fossil fuels have the intention of burning “each last oil and gas molecule” under the earth’s crust, Vicki Hollub, CEO of Western Petroleum, said in 2024. Thus, citizen activism, adds McKibben, remains imperative.

All this and more done Here is the sun An essential reading for anyone interested in the direction of climate history. McKibben reports are deepened and stimulating. He is investigating a certain number of concerns about solar energy – there are enough raw materials and land to produce all the necessary panels and electricity? – and concludes that such concerns are overestimated. (More solar energy will indeed mean more mining for lithium and other minerals, he notes, but this will also stop the much larger quantity of operations for coal, gas and petroleum.)

For journalists, Here is the sun PROFFERS A horn of abundance of history ideas and a massized reassessment of the future of climate combat. He refutes the idea that society cannot afford to stop burning fossil fuels, while stressing that the decisive question is the speed with which these fuels are left behind. “I have no doubt that we will direct the world on the sun and the wind in 40 years,” wrote McKibben, “but if it takes us something like 40 years to get there, then it will be a broken planet; Our sources of energy will not have any importance. ”