Sun illustration (2023) | Ride Studio / Shutterstock
What motivates people to work for social change—and work for it fast? In his most recent book, Here Comes the Sun (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025), the veteran climate reporter Bill McKibben tries to answer that question by presenting two truths. The first is that we are now in a “desperate race” to do things differently:
Scientists have told us that to stay on anything like a survivable path we must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half before the decade is out. That target is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, and this book is an effort to shove us toward that deadline.
Alongside this dire truth, McKibben presents another: that amazing things are happening in the world of renewable energy.
In mid-2022, he writes, it became cheaper to produce energy with the sun or wind than by burning fossil fuels. Recent advances in solar, wind, and battery technology have made it possible to power the planet entirely with renewables for the first time in history. And the rapid ongoing rollout of solar and wind throughout the world—especially in China—promises to upend the fossil fuel industry’s nearly 200-year domination of global politics.
All of this leads McKibben to write that after 35 years of embattled reporting on the climate crisis he is willing to shed his reputation as a “dark realist” and entertain a little optimism for a moment. “Right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward,” McKibben writes. He believes that our current situation offers us “a remarkable choice”: staying the course with fossil fuels and ensuring climate catastrophe, or veering sharply toward renewables and ushering in a cleaner, better world.
The Trump administration has clearly chosen to stay the course. There will be no government-funded swerve toward green energy in the next couple of years but rather an acceleration down the road to destruction. How can we reconcile the progress McKibben describes in this book with the tragic regression we see all around us?
The fact is, the vast majority of progress in renewables is happening in China and through Chinese partnerships. In 2020, China set a goal of producing 1,200 gigawatts of clean power by 2030. Thanks in part to its COVID-19-driven building boom, it met that goal six years early. By 2024, the country was adding to its rapidly expanding electric grid a gigawatt of renewable energy—the equivalent of a new coal-fired plant—every 18 hours.
In some of the book’s most vivid passages, McKibben reports on how an influx of cheap Chinese solar panels has begun to lift the boot of the fossil fuel industry off the necks of the poor. In Pakistan, where eight million people were displaced by record-setting floods in 2022, McKibben describes farmers laying down solar panels to power their irrigation equipment, freeing them from dependence on diesel generators and the costly fuel it takes to run them. Driven by shopkeepers and factory managers in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistanis have built the equivalent of a third of the country’s electric grid by installing Chinese solar panels on their roofs.
Throughout Africa, mini-grids are starting to connect individual solar producers to power villages, towns, and even small cities. There are 3,000 such grids right now, but 160,000 are needed to supply the continent.
As McKibben points out, $90 billion would be enough to solarize Africa. To expedite this, he suggests, only half jokingly, that someone could simply pay Chinese factories could crank out solar panels 24/7 and ship them to ports where enterprising folks could grab and install them as needed.
That move alone, McKibben claims, might bend the curve of climate change. And the price tag is a negligible sum for some of the world’s richest men, but no one has heeded the call just yet.
In his reporting closer to home, McKibben shows that support for renewables is far more widespread than Trump and his fossil fuel cronies would like us to believe it is, that the technology is getting better all the time, and that people across the country are continuing to find ways to produce wind and solar, which together made up 96 percent of all new electricity added to the US grid in 2024.
Texas rivals California in bringing many gigawatts of renewable energy online fast, thanks to its longstanding policy of buying any electricity that makers produce. In March 2025, Utah became the first state in the country to allow consumers to install plug-in balcony solar systems without permits; the Republican-sponsored bill passed the Utah state legislature unanimously and was signed into law by Republican governor Spencer Cox. On September 25, New York State Senator Liz Krueger introduced a similar balcony solar bill for New York.
In rural Illinois, McKibben reports on how Jon Carson, a solar developer, helps farmers convert small portions of their cornfields to solar arrays using union labor. The projects not only provide a far greater return than corn but create highly paid skilled jobs in an area that desperately needs them.
But will hitching these inspiring tales to the spectre of climate catastrophe speed up the pace of change, as McKibben hopes? Unlikely. Most of the stories in Here Comes the Sun indicate that economic incentives, rather than fear of climate collapse, drive most of the investment in and use of renewables. He notes that the affluent people most aware of climate change have been some of the most vocal opponents of solar projects in New Mexico and Vermont: They like the idea so long as it doesn’t impede their view.
Then there’s the fact that to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, the rapid rollout of renewables must be accompanied by the shuttering of coal-fired plants, the halting of oil and gas pipelines, and the banning of fracking. None of that is happening quickly enough. In fact, the opposite is happening. Wind and solar projects are being halted as new pipelines and gas plants are being built.
Despite all the positive news in the world of renewables, total carbon emissions actually rose last year, and 2024 global temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages, putting a once-cherished target (“1.5 to Stay Alive”) in the rearview mirror. McKibben’s own climate activist group, 350.org, founded back in 2008, was named for the goal of keeping atmospheric carbon under 350 parts per million (ppm). As of late January, it hovers around 430 ppm.
McKibben is more persuasive when he describes the myriad ways that solar, wind, and the batteries that store their power are just plain better—greener, of course, but also more efficient, longer lasting, and more attractive—than their fossil-fuel counterparts. Likewise, his deft portraits of some of renewables’ most devoted champions provide a clear window onto what purpose-driven lives look like, even when the going gets tough.
