Energy from Heaven, Not from Hell

Bill McKibben makes the case for combating the climate crisis by transitioning from fossil fuels to solar power.

By Miyo McGinnJanuary 5, 2026

• Science & Technology

• Environment

BILL MCKIBBEN HAS BEEN making moves to curtail climate change since before there was a “climate movement.” He wrote The End of Nature, widely regarded as the first book for general audiences about the climate crisis—as he calls it, the “original dread book”—nearly 40 years ago. In the decades since, he has worked on an impressive range of projects to slow the planet’s warming: in 2007, he co-founded the organization 350.org to organize fossil-fuel divestment campaigns; in 2021, he helped launch Third Act, a group aimed at mobilizing older people to take climate action. His most recent initiative, Sun Day, seeks to build momentum around the transition to solar energy in the United States (the first “Sun Day” was held this fall, on September 21).

I met Bill in 2010 through my dad’s involvement in fossil-fuel divestment. Brief though that encounter was, I’ve kept running into him and his work ever since. By now, I’ve spent enough time as an environmental journalist learning about and reporting on the issue to recognize that the climate crisis is a sprawling, complex problem that affects every facet of our world a little differently. There are incredibly few people capable of putting together an accessible, compelling bird’s-eye view of the crisis and the answering movement—and coming up with actionable insight. Bill is one of those people.

His new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, is as full of figures and research as any study of climate change, but the final product doesn’t read like a scientific report or textbook. Reading Bill feels less like studying and more like being told a story by your favorite uncle: there are characters and stakes; it all makes sense; sometimes, it’s even funny. The main takeaway from his latest: Renewables generally—and, as suggested by the title, solar power in particular—have finally become a more cost-effective energy source than fossil fuels. Yet just as a world powered by the sun is now possible, Donald Trump’s insistence on cutting investments in clean energy infrastructure and subsidizing coal threatens many tangible movements toward that world.

I called Bill in August for a conversation about the costs and benefits of transitioning to renewable energy, the best places for people to direct their efforts right now, and the human and spiritual implications of a society fueled by the sun.

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MIYO MCGINN: There are a lot of different levers to pull in trying to address the climate crisis, and over the years, you’ve thrown your weight behind many of them. Why are you focusing on solar energy at the moment?

BILL MCKIBBEN: I think this is where we are now. This is the most interesting set of possibilities. This is the only course that seems to offer the opportunity to really change the outcome.

The problem is that we have to make this transition really fast if it’s going to matter, because the climate is changing at an accelerating rate. We can see it happening in real time. It gets worse month by month, and the window to make this transition is terrifyingly narrow. I don’t know if we’ll manage to accelerate the clean energy transition enough to meet the physics of climate change. But I do feel—for the first time in the 40 years I’ve been working on this—that we actually have something that we can scale with a shot at limiting the damage.

All of the books I’ve read about climate change can be ranked somewhere between one and 10 on the dread scale. This one was definitely less dread-inspiring than some of the rest.

Ha! Yeah, I wrote the original dread book. Which is why I’ve got to say that this one was fun. It’s a strange moment—the complete horror of what’s happening in our country and the fact that there is one big piece of good news in the world … I hope I can figure out how to hold those things in some kind of realistic balance. We’re fighting hard at Third Act against what’s happening in DC, but we’re also fighting hard for solar. It’s neat to have something positive to be working on as well as damage control.

I was struck by your point that this is a chance for climate activists to be for something, not just working against things (pipelines, oil and gas investments, fossil fuels).

It’s interesting—I’ve been involved in that activism for decades, right? And all that activism happened in a world where fossil fuels were cheap and renewable energy was expensive. So the goal was to change that equation: put a tax on carbon, divest from fossil fuels to drive up their cost of capital, slow their infrastructure expansion and make it more expensive. Those things were helpful—but now we’re in a world where economic gravity is working in our direction, and it’s the fossil-fuel industry that has to play politics furiously to prevent the inevitable. They’ve got enough money that they can do this effectively—but at least we’re in a different position now. And that means we have to think about the world a little differently, and concentrate on new things.

Given that shift, it’s even harder to watch the Trump administration cut funding for renewable energy and reinvest in fossil fuels right now, when we could be so close to a clean energy transition.

I think that the pivot of the Trump administration is definitive proof of just how powerful this trend toward clean energy is. You know, they’re very scared, and that’s why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s possible that they’ll succeed, and that 20 years from now, the United States will be a kind of museum of internal combustion, where people from the rest of the world will come to gawk at how humans once lived.

But my guess is, even here in the US, the fossil-fuel industry is going to have a hard time. Texas is actually the fastest growing renewable state in the country. The Texas legislature tried to shut it down in their session this spring, but there were so many Texans from rural parts of the state who showed up to say: “Don’t close down our solar farms. That’s how you pay for our schools.” And the legislature backed off. So, even here in the US, I think there’s still a certain amount of possibility—especially if we push hard. Hence Sun Day.

Yes, Sun Day! You describe this “day of action” at length in the book. What’s the vision in a nutshell?

If there’s one overarching goal for Sun Day, it’s to start driving home the message that renewables, especially solar, are not “alternative” energy anymore. That’s the phrase we’ve been using for as long as I can remember, and it’s just no longer true. Last year, 95 percent of new electric generation around the world came from the sun and wind.

The way I sometimes explain it is that we’re used to thinking of solar power as the Whole Foods of energy—nice but pricey. But it’s really the Costco of power now: cheap, available in bulk on the shelf. Ready to go. That’s a really important message to get across. If we do, that makes it much easier to do the things we can do on a policy level—even with Washington in insane hands.

There’s a lot that we’ll be pushing for on Sun Day, at both state and local levels. For example, it costs about three times as much to put solar on the roof in the United States as it does in Australia, and that’s mostly due to the fact that you have to get through this ridiculous, byzantine permitting system. (There are at least 10,000 regulatory jurisdictions, and each one has its own rules for how to design that system, and so on.) But there’s an easy way around that. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory did this thing called SolarAPP+ a few years ago, and then spun it off to offer automated, instant permitting. Some states, including California, Maryland, and New Jersey, have all mandated that localities start using it.

Are there other specific energy policies or avenues for change that have you excited right now?

I’ve been encouraged by lots of things—across Europe, balcony solar panels have exploded in the last few years. You can go to IKEA and buy a solar panel that’s designed to hang over the railing of your balcony and plug into the wall; they can produce around a quarter of an apartment’s power. It’s illegal everywhere in the United States—except Utah, where, just a couple months ago, a libertarian-minded state senator convinced the legislature to pass a law allowing people to put up panels. To me, that signals that there’s a lot we can do locally.

The statistic that really catches my imagination is that California—the fourth-largest economy in the world—is using 40 percent less natural gas this year to generate electricity than they did two years ago. That’s a big number. If you could spread that everywhere, that starts knocking tenths of a degree from how hot the planet will get. Every tenth of a degree Celsius of warming moves about another 100 million people out of a climatically comfortable zone and into a place where they may have to run for their lives. So there’s real scope, finally, for making change. A lot of the work we’ve been doing for the last 20 years has been trying to hold back the fossil-fuel industry and do as much as we could to slow them down, in the hope that this day was coming. Now it’s here. And so our job is to beat the fossil-fuel industry’s efforts to stop this transition.

As you mentioned, lobbying by the fossil-fuel industry is one impediment to the clean energy transition. In Here Comes the Sun, you address the question “Why can’t Big Oil just pivot to become ‘Big Solar?’”

If solar has a weakness, it’s that it is, in a sense, too cheap. You can make money putting up solar panels—people have, and will, make money that way. There’ll be solar millionaires and billionaires, but there won’t be solar Rockefellers. And the reason is that, once you put the panel up, the sun delivers the energy for free. You can’t hold sunshine in reserves. You can’t make people pay more each month for the rest of their lives for access to energy. You can do that with oil, which made Exxon one of the richest companies on earth. Last year, Exxon’s CEO said they weren’t going to invest in renewable energy because, as he put it, it didn’t offer “above average returns for our investors.” It can’t, because it’s free. And in a weird way, that makes it harder, not easier, to spread around the world.

Because there’s not a bunch of capitalists trying to, well, capitalize on solar?

Exactly.

So who is incentivized to transition to clean energy? In the shorter-term, economic sense, I mean—obviously, it’s in everyone’s interest not to keep lighting the planet on fire.

Around 80 percent of people around the world live in places that have to import fossil fuels. When we talk about poor countries being in a debt crisis, or having a balance of payments deficit, the biggest part of that is often simply trying to pay for fossil fuel. You have to write a check to get the ship at anchor in the harbor to unload the next load of diesel so you can run your country. So there’s an incredible incentive for those countries to figure out how to make this switch as fast as they can.

The Chinese are, I think, in a position to drive that change all around the world. They have the trading relationships. As of June, more than 50 percent of the cars being sold there have a plug attached to them; there’s just not going to be high demand for oil when a clean electric future is so much cheaper and better. This is the path they seem to be choosing for global legitimacy: they’re clearly going to be the dominant nation in the world when it comes to dealing with the biggest problem that humans have ever faced.

We in the United States have ceded all that. We’re not just letting the Chinese eat our lunch—we’re sending a team of red-capped waiters over to serve that lunch to them. It’s truly pathetic when you think about it: both the solar cell and the lithium-ion battery were invented in the US, but we’ve ceded leadership of these important 21st-century technologies to another country.

Besides climate change, one of the most destructive consequences of our reliance on fossil fuels is the resulting geopolitical conflict. How would that be different if humanity drew its power from the sun?

Even humans are going to struggle to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine. And you know, that’s pretty remarkable. The more I think about it, the more it makes me at least a little optimistic for the world to come.

Throughout the book, you lay out the case for transitioning to solar energy with clarity, conviction, and a lot of numbers. But nothing is perfect, and solar does have its drawbacks—particularly the environmental and human rights harm of mining the minerals used in solar panels. On the page, you’re pretty up-front that you’re not totally sure how to weigh and mitigate the potential harms of solar. How are you thinking about the downsides these days?

The environmental impacts are real, but they don’t worry me as much as the human rights impacts. Solar’s impacts are so much smaller than the impacts of fossil-fuel mining—there was a study from the Rocky Mountain Institute last year saying the volume of minerals that we need to transition to solar between now and 2050 is smaller than the volume of coal we mined last year. If you think about it for a minute, that makes sense: You mine some lithium, you get to use it for a quarter century in your battery, and then you can recycle it. You mine some coal, you set it on fire, and then you have to get more.

When it comes to human rights, it’s hard to grapple with the fact that, for example, there’s a lot of cobalt in the Congo. Conditions there are terrible; there does seem to be some improvement, but there should be a lot more, and people should be working hard on that. But for me—this sounds highly utilitarian, and I guess it is—you have to balance that against the fact that at least nine million people die every year on this planet from breathing the combustion by-products of fossil fuel. That’s about one death in five. If you’ve been to Delhi or Mumbai in the last few years, then you have a strong sense of what that looks like. It’s really all over the place—lots of American kids get asthma from those particulates too.

So, even without climate change, I think the weight comes down on the side of making this transition quickly, and when you factor in climate change—and the, not even risk, but guarantee of existential disaster it represents—then I think it’s pretty obvious. There is no free lunch, but there definitely are lunches that cost less and lunches that cost more.

Basically, there are—and will be—human costs no matter what.

That’s correct. And because we’re used to paying the human cost of fossil fuel, we don’t register it the same way. People don’t really think about the fact that there are this many people dying from its by-products.

I want to talk, for a little bit, about faith. I was only a couple chapters into Here Comes the Sun when a friend asked me what it was about, and I told them that it was basically the scientific case for sun worship.

I’m a good Methodist, so I’m not exactly a “sun worshipper” myself—but I do feel strongly that all human cultures have had a deep affection for the sun, and it would be very nice to recapture as much of that as we can. My mantra in recent years has been energy from heaven, not from hell.

I love that. In the final chapter, you step back from the science and ask what it could mean, spiritually, for humans to reorient our society toward the sun. How do you see spirituality and faith fitting into the transition to renewable energy?

This was my favorite chapter to write. The human connection to the sun, it turns out, is extraordinarily deep. Every human mythological system had to come up with a way to explain how the sun rose and set every day. The oldest remnants that we have of human civilizations—temples, Stonehenge—are oriented around the solar calendar, and this connection persists. I mean, the title of this book is from George Harrison—I was very happy to learn that “Here Comes the Sun” is by far the most popular in the Beatles’ catalog, at least on Spotify. (People listen to it twice as often as “Hey Jude” or any of their other hits!)

We have to do this thing because our planet will melt if we don’t. But there are also a lot of other good reasons, including this chance for reconnecting on a human and spiritual level. I was really struck, last spring, when there was a total solar eclipse over Vermont. It was the most unified moment of the year; everybody spent the day watching. There were 1,500 kids out on the quad at Middlebury College, where I teach sometimes, and they were all in stunned, happy silence. No one was on their phone.

Has your own relationship with the earth changed as you’ve done research for this book?

Yeah, a little. You know me: I love the outdoors, and I have always spent a huge amount of time there—but that affection makes climate change very alienating. All winter long, I can’t help but think: It should be colder than this. It should be snowing, not raining. I can’t help thinking, all summer long: Man, I wish I didn’t have to worry so much about ticks. Or: It’s too hot or too humid out here. We’re breathing wildfire smoke all the time in the Northeast, and it’s gross.

That kind of alienation from the natural world has been very painful for me, because I love wild places. So it’s been a great pleasure to think about the sun a good deal more than I ever have in the past. And it turns out the sun’s unbelievably interesting, even just as a physical object—I really enjoyed researching how it works. We’re finding out more all the time: while I was writing this book, a satellite made the closest approach to the sun ever, and brought back lots of interesting information. So, yeah—I’m definitely a sun guy now.

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Featured image: Photo of Bill McKibben by StoryWorkz.