Bill McKibben makes a powerful pitch for solar in optimistic new book

Here is the sun
(Bill McKibben ww Norton, United Kingdom, September 16; United States, August 19)

The sun rises on solar energy. According to EMBER, an energy reflection group, solar energy is the fastest source of electricity in the world in the past 20 years, and it accelerates.

In 2022, solar energy capacity exceeded 1 terawatt for the first time. Two years later, he had doubled, generating 7% of world electricity. When you include wind turbines (which capture the energy of the sun via a different mechanism), the sun generated 15% of Earth electricity last year.

This solar energy boom is not due to countries that suddenly become their climate commitments seriously. In fact, according to another EMPER report, most of the renewable energy goals are still far behind the hat-trick that is necessary for this decade to stay on the right track for net-zero emissions.

The real reason why solar energy takes off is that it has become the cheapest way to produce electricity almost everywhere.

In Here is the sun: a last chance for the climate and a new chance of civilizationBill McKibben, a long -standing climate activist and ecologist, argues that this change leaves the world “on the verge of these rare and enormous transformations in human history” where we go from a dominant source of energy, fossil fuels, to another, the sun. “We are about to turn to the heavens for energy rather than hell,” writes McKibben.

The following is a moving and argued account of the way in which cheap solar energy now offers us a chance not only to fight against climate change in time, but to redo our savings and our relationship with the natural world.

It is hardly the first book to plead for a rapid transition to renewable energies. But he is visionary in the way he goes beyond the technical and economic dimensions of the energy transition to explore what a society fueled by the sun could look like.

“Suddenly, this entirely necessary conversion is also the biggest matter of all time, that which could upset our conventional economy of rarity and replace it with something that we do not yet understand completely,” he wrote.

That this sunny optimism comes from McKibben, the first book of which was entitled The end of nature And which was among the first to stimulate the alarm on climate change, makes it much more powerful.

Instead of detailing the damage caused by climate change and how all this could get worse, it emphasizes the advantages that could come from more solar energy, such as the prices of lower and more stable energy and less dependence on the petrots.

At the spiritual level, it alludes to how this change could restore our sense of fear for the sun and its power.

McKibben is also alive to the skeptics of renewable energies and offers balanced responses on how to resolve compromises of the energy transition, such as the increase in demand for minerals and land, and to lose jobs in the fossil fuel industry. These are supported not only by figures, but an eclectic suite of anecdotes from the first days of the energy transition in the world. I was delighted to learn, for example, that the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum went to solar energy to save energy costs.

However, there are many reasons to doubt that all these dreams fueled by the sun will pass as quickly as McKibben suggests. Remember that most of the extraordinary expansion of solar energy occurs in China. There is no guarantee that countries without the unique combination of manufacturing prowess, central planning and authoritarian policy can correspond to this stock market. He might not even be durable.

In the United States, solar energy has experienced record growth for several years, but it now faces the hostility of the Trump administration with renewable energies. After losing the tax credits that equalized the playing field with subsidized fossil fuels, there is certainly more headwind. The local opposition to renewable energies projects also makes it difficult to expand.

As McKibben accepts it, two things can be true at the same time: an energy transition led by solar energy could be inevitable, and the reduction of emissions may not occur quickly enough to avoid the ever more dangerous consequences of global warming. “It will not be easy, but that’s what should happen,” he wrote. “We have to stop burns – or we will burn.”

I agree. Personally, I prefer to lounge in the sun.