Put yourself at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Countries around the world transforming their production and transportation, reconfiguring their futures in real time. Now imagine the president of your country decided to opt out—he cut support for railway development in order to promote the horse and buggy.

While an imperfect analogy, it’s not dissimilar to how the Trump administration has treated possibly the biggest energy innovation since then, one that could now phase out the antiquated energy production technology of the 1800’s: solar power. Just recently, President Trump said his administration would not approve new solar or wind projects; he ordered a stop to a nearly finished wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island; and his spending bill cut Biden-era subsidies for renewable energy development and implementation. In a moment where demand for energy is skyrocketing due to AI data centers, consumer utility prices are hitting record highs, and the climate crisis burns on, Trump has made an enemy of the cheap, abundant, and efficient solution.    

But don’t take it from me. Take it from renowned environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who wrote the first book about global warming in 1989, before people even knew what that meant. Since then, he says, he’s never seen a more promising development that might actually change how hot our planet gets. If we can implement it fast enough. 

McKibben’s new book is Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. I spoke with him about the recent global shift in solar production, how the technology is radically changing other countries, and why Trump is holding the U.S. back from a moment of critical innovation. 

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Noa Azulai: Tell me about the scope of the solar revolution happening right now around the world. How quickly is it happening?

Bill McKibben: This is a story literally of the last 36 months. For the first 40 years of the climate debate, we lived in a world where fossil fuel was cheap and renewable energy was expensive. But through a combination of activism and engineering, the price of renewable energy just kept dropping and dropping. And about four or five years ago, it crossed an invisible line where it became cheaper to generate electricity either directly from the sun’s rays or taking advantage of this fact that the sun differentially heats the earth creating the wind that turns those turbines. Once we’d crossed that invisible line, things began to happen very very fast.

It took from 1954 to 2022 to get the first terawatt of solar panels up on the surface of the planet. The second terawatt came in the next two years and the third one is coming in under 18 months. The numbers are really staggering. By May, the Chinese were putting up the equivalent of three gigawatts of solar power a day—the solar equivalent of a big coal fired power plant every eight hours across China. 

This is possible because this technology is so easy to put together. It’s not like putting together a big coal fired power plant. It’s more like playing with Legos—you just snap together solar panels, point them at the sun, connect them to a cord, and you’re in business. 95% of the new generation on this planet last year came from clean energy, sun and wind mostly. 

California, which is the place in this country that’s taken it most seriously, has put up enough solar panels so that almost every day, the state generates more than 100% of its electricity for long periods from renewables. That means that at night, the biggest source of supply to the grid are batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. California is now using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were just two years ago. That’s the fourth largest economy in the world. If that can change like that, you can begin to see how we might not stop global warming—it is sadly too late for that— but stop it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees. In a world where there are immense numbers of big bad things happening right now, this is the one big good thing that’s happening. 

Noa Azulai: Why should people be paying attention to this?

Bill McKibben: I hope this will appeal to those who are not just concerned about the climate. This energy transition helps in lots of other ways too. Perhaps the second biggest problem on our planet is the grotesque and cartoonish levels of inequality that produce anti-democratic outcomes. To no small degree, those stem from the fact that we rely on a source of power that’s only available in a few places, and the people who control them get too much money and too much power. Hence John D. Rockefeller, and, in more recent times, the Koch brothers, who are our biggest oil and gas barons, and controlled more refining and pipeline capacity than anyone else. If you want to understand why Donald Trump has been able to kick over so many democratic institutions so easily, it’s because their pillars have been rotted out by 30 years of the Koch brothers doing their thing. Vladimir Putin is the biggest oil and gas baron on the planet and he’s using his winnings to mount a land war in Europe in the 21st century.

Just try to imagine the geopolitics of our earth in the last 70 years if oil was of trivial value. How many wars and terrorist plots and assassinations and coups we could have avoided. Imagine a world that runs on a resource that’s available essentially to everyone everywhere and that can’t really be hoarded or held in reserve.

Noa Azulai: One might think that an abundant, democratizable, super efficient energy source would be welcomed by national leaders.…why has the Trump administration been so hostile to the solar industry, and other types of clean energy? 

Bill McKibben: It is being welcomed by most governments. 80% of the world’s population lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuel. For pretty much any of them this is the best possible news. If you’re a poor country in this world and you’re forever facing a debt crisis, it usually has to do with having a huge import bill for fossil fuel. Take India, which is one of the largest economies in the world. Five percent of their GDP is used to import fossil fuel. The number is much higher in many smaller poorer countries. So in most places, the arrival of solar energy is perceived as good news. 

The U.S. is the leading producer of gas and the second or third leading producer of oil in the country. And we’ve allowed our political system to become the province of people with money. The fossil fuel industry has enormous cash flow and big cash reserves and they’ve used them to game our political system. This time last year, candidate Trump held a not-very-secret meeting with oil executives in which he told them, in Austin Powers fashion, “Give me a billion dollars for my campaign and you can have anything that you want.” They gave him roughly half a billion between donations, advertising, and lobbying. And clearly that was enough.

Noa Azulai: On top of the profound impact on the climate, what else is the impact of Trump kneecapping our country’s development in the energy space? 

Bill McKibben: We’re going to pay a huge amount of money that we wouldn’t otherwise have to.  So far this year, electricity prices are up about 10% across the country, way outpacing inflation. And that’s no big mystery. On the one hand, we’re kowtowing to every demand of the data center industry to put up more warehouses full of servers everywhere which take lots of electricity.  And on the other hand, we’re constricting the supply by saying you can’t build the fastest to build forms of energy. You don’t really need to be a Nobel Prize-winning economist to figure out that if you increase demand and constrict supply, the price is going to go up. And it is going up. So there’s that huge impact on individual Americans. 

In the longer term, the U.S. is signing up for an ongoing, endless comparative disadvantage with every other place in the world, which is going to have oodles of cheap electricity to underwrite their economy. It’s maddening because all of this was invented here and now, it’s not just that the Chinese are eating our lunch, it’s that we have sent a team of redcapped waiters to serve our lunch. It’s impossible to think of a more stupid and self-defeating choice that America’s ever made. This is the biggest own-goal of all time.

Noa Azulai: Renewable energy has been super politicized, but what can you tell me about how red states and local communities actually feel about solar power? Should we start to reframe the conversation about solar energy in our politics?

Bill McKibben: That’s a very good question. There’s been this all-out Republican effort to demonize renewable energy for the last few years. To some degree, it worked. The polling shows that Republicans are less keen now on renewable energy than they used to be. But the numbers are still actually quite high. Everybody likes solar power, and they like it for different reasons.

I’ve lived my whole life in very rural America, in both red and blue states. I have a lot of conservative neighbors, a lot of Trump flags up and down the dirt road near me. And a lot of them have solar panels. And it’s this ethos of, “My home is my castle and I’m going to defend it with my AR-15, and if I’ve got solar panels on the roof then it really is my castle.” 

For example, Texas is now putting up renewable energy faster than any place in the country. Community members in Texas actually repelled efforts in the state legislature this year to slow down the energy transition because representatives kept hearing from the hinterlands who were saying, “This is how we pay the property taxes in our town. This is how we fund our school system. Don’t do this.” And so, the legislature, unlike the U.S. Congress, backed down. 

My favorite story along these lines comes from Utah. Across Europe in the last three years, apartment dwellers have been deploying this new technology that we call balcony solar. You can go to IKEA or Best Buy in Stuttgart and, for a few hundred euros, come home with a solar panel designed to be hung from the railing of your balcony at your apartment, since you may not have a roof of your own. Then, you just plug it into the wall with a standard plug, and it often supplies 25% of the energy that the apartment’s using. People love it. That’s illegal everywhere in America—except the state of Utah, which voted unanimously earlier this year to pass legislation. All because some libertarian state senator stood up and said, “Why can people in Frankfurt do this and not my constituents in Provo?” No one had a good reason, so now you can. We think that we can pass that kind of legislation in lots of places. 

It’s important that we stop thinking of this as “alternative energy.” The analogy I like to use is that we think of renewable energy as the Whole Foods of energy: It’s nice but pricey. When in fact, it’s now the Costco of energy: It’s cheap, you can get it in bulk, it’s on the shelf and ready to deploy. 

Noa Azulai: What is Sun Day, and how can people get involved? 

Bill McKibben: Sun Day is a national day of action on the equinox, September 21st. One of the big aims is to make permitting much easier for balcony solar and for rooftop solar, which is three or four times more expensive in this country than it is in Australia or Europe, because we have 15,000 different municipalities each with its own building code and inspectors.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratories put out SolarApp+ a couple of years ago and it essentially allows instantaneous permitting. This is already mandated in California, Maryland, and it’s passed the legislature in New Jersey. But we should do it everywhere. We’re pushing hard to pass this kind of legislation now, when we can’t really do anything in Washington until we’ve had more elections. And while we’re doing that, the good news is that other countries are not deterred in the way that ours are. 

So go to Sunday.earth and find what’s happening near you. And if there isn’t something right near you, then schedule something. People are hosting home tours of their heat pumps and solar panels to show how easy they can be to install. Other places people are doing e-bike parades, solar powered concerts, protests outside the utilities that are still trying to hoist gas pipelines on places where we don’t need them anymore. There’ll be a big broad range of actions. If it works, we’ll make some progress on a lot of these local laws.