For 700,000 years, humanity has laboured to secure energy, from gathering firewood to paying steep utility bills. According to veteran environmental author and activist Bill McKibben, that gruelling chapter could finally be closing for those living in regions wise enough to embrace solar panels and wind turbines.
The Crucial Tool We Now Possess
In a recent interview, McKibben, whose seminal 1989 book The End of Nature offered an early warning on climate change, presented a cautiously hopeful outlook. He stressed that while the dire predictions of decades past have materialised and the planet is warming rapidly, a powerful new tool has emerged in the last three to four years.
This tool is not a solution to stop global warming entirely, he concedes, but a means to potentially "shave some tenths of a degree" off future temperature rises. That tool is the combination of cheap renewable energy from the sun and wind, coupled with advanced battery storage technology.
McKibben points out the sheer logic of this shift: it is now the "commonsense, obvious, straightforward way to make power." This is evidenced by the fact that 95% of all new electricity generation capacity built globally last year came from these clean sources.
Global Leadership and a Staggering Scale of Change
The inspiration for his latest book, Here Comes the Sun, came from what he calls a "scoop"—observing a dramatic, global inflection point in renewable adoption about three years ago. The world, he says, has hit the steep part of the growth curve.
Leadership in this sector, McKibben asserts, has been decisively ceded to China. The scale of their deployment is almost inconceivable. In May alone, China was installing three gigawatts of solar capacity every day. To put that in perspective, a single gigawatt is roughly equivalent to a large coal-fired power station. They were, in effect, building the equivalent of one such plant every eight hours using only solar panels.
This revolution is not confined to one nation. In Australia, an abundance of solar power has led to a government initiative offering free electricity to all citizens for three hours every afternoon. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, citizens and businesses have independently installed so much solar capacity that the government recently cancelled a major shipment of liquefied natural gas from Qatar, opting to pay a penalty rather than import unneeded fossil fuel.
Overcoming Resistance and Reclaiming a Missed Future
McKibben argues this transition promises to address deep global inequalities fostered by fossil fuels. Unlike oil and gas, which concentrate wealth and power in specific regions, sun and wind are available everywhere, particularly benefitting equatorial nations. For the 80% of humanity living in fuel-importing countries, renewables offer energy independence.
The primary obstacle, he states bluntly, is the trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry, which views the renewable boom as an existential threat. In the United States, this resistance has been particularly effective. McKibben cites the industry's political influence, including substantial campaign donations, which he believes led to the cancellation of nearly complete offshore wind farms and a massive solar project in Nevada that could have powered over two million homes.
This obstructionism, combined with decades of industry-funded disinformation, has caused what McKibben labels an extraordinary act of "national self-sabotage." The foundational technologies for solar cells and industrial wind turbines were American inventions, yet the US has now fallen behind its main geopolitical rival in the race to dominate the clean energy future.
Despite the challenges, McKibben finds reason for optimism beyond economics and climate urgency. He sees a profound cultural and almost spiritual alignment with harvesting energy from the sun, a connection celebrated in myth, song, and ancient monuments like Stonehenge. His call to action is simple: "Let’s henceforth concentrate on energy from heaven, not from hell."
