Sometimes I get to bring you a conversation that really feels like a turning point.

This week, I sat down with Bill McKibben, one of the most respected voices in climate and energy. His new book, Here Comes the Sun (out today! order it here), is different from his earlier work. Bill has long been known for sounding the alarm. But this time, he’s bringing something else: optimism.

Why? Because solar and other clean technologies are no longer “someday.” They are scaling now — all around the world — faster than anyone predicted.

Solar’s Exponential Takeoff

In 2009, The Economist predicted it would take 20 years for solar to scale up by an order of magnitude.

It took six.

Today, the world installs 230–240 gigawatts of solar every six months. That’s two massive coal plants’ worth of clean energy every single day.

This isn’t fringe. This isn’t boutique. It’s mainstream power.

Think Costco, not Whole Foods. Bulk, cheap, ready-to-go.

Everywhere from Pakistan to Texas: A Global Story

The shift is happening everywhere.

* In Pakistan, rooftop solar grew so fast that in just 8 months, citizens built the equivalent of half their national grid. Farmers led the way, cutting diesel use by 35 percent in a single year.

* In Texas, oil and gas operators in the Permian are connecting to the grid or tapping wind and solar because it is cheaper than running diesel generators.

When energy is more affordable, more reliable, and easier to deploy, people adopt it. That is true from Karachi to the Concho Valley.

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No Longer “Alternative Energy”

We’ve used the phrase “alternative energy” for wind and solar for decades. Now it means something different: natural gas and coal are the alternatives and renewables + storage are the most common, even dominant, resources.

Last year, 90% of new power plants built worldwide were clean energy.

Oil and gas remain vital and will continue to play an important role, but the growth is in clean energy.

Leading With People’s Needs, Not Just Climate

Here’s the pivot that excites me most.

If we lead with “climate crisis,” people shut down. Either they don’t agree it’s happening and check out, or they get it and feel depressed and stressed out.

But if we lead with better lives and lower bills, people listen:

* Half of Texans report they are choosing between food, medicine, and electricity. Renewables lower costs.

* EVs aren’t sacrifices. They are smoother, faster, and cheaper to fuel.

* Heat pumps aren’t compromises. They reduce stress on the grid, make homes more comfortable, and lower consumers’ energy bills.

When we talk about clean energy in terms of savings and resilience, people connect. And those benefits also happen to reduce emissions.

This is not about jerseys or tribes. It’s about abundance.

Land, Liberty, and Local Benefits

Opponents often argue renewables take up too much land. But the math tells a different story:

* 1 acre of corn for ethanol → fuels an F-150 for ~25,000 miles.

* 1 acre of solar panels → powers an F-150 Lightning for 700,000 miles.

That’s not even close.

And the benefits are tangible:

* Ranchers and farmers are keeping land in the family thanks to wind and solar leases.

* Rural schools are funded by clean energy tax revenue.

* Cattle graze happily under turbines, even using them for shade.

This is energy independence at the community level — red state, blue state, doesn’t matter.

A Race Between Challenge and Opportunity

We’re living two stories at once:

* Bad News: By June 2023, Earth had entered the hottest 12-month stretch in 125,000 years.

* Good News: That same month, humanity began installing over a gigawatt of solar per day.

The race is on. The question is not if we transition. It’s how fast.

The outcome depends on how quickly we build. We now have the tools to create cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable power. The question is whether we will use them fast enough.

Bill put it bluntly: “We can’t stop global warming. But we can stop it short of breaking civilization.”

Why Policy Still Matters

The economics are overwhelming, but politics can slow things down.

* Texas became a leader in wind power because of transmission investments made two decades ago.

* The oil and gas industry poured $500 million into lobbying and ads last year.

* Rooftop solar in the U.S. still takes months to permit, compared to days in places like Australia.

* And yet, local politics in Texas are shifting as communities fight for renewables that pay their bills.

This is where action, at the state and local level, can accelerate the inevitable.

The lesson is clear: smart policy can clear barriers so Texans can benefit sooner.

The Moment

After 700,000 years of burning things for fuel, humanity is finally learning to power itself directly from the sun.

That’s not just about climate. It’s about freedom, prosperity, and better technology.

Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun, captures this moment with story after story of how fast change is happening. It’s out now, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

He’s also helping organize a national day of action called Sunday on September 21st. Learn more at sunday.earth.

If you got value from this, please share it with a friend, colleague, or family member and consider subscribing. The more people who see clean energy for what it is, the future, the faster we’ll build it.

Transcript

* 00:00 – Introduction

* 02:30 – Why Bill is uncharacteristically optimistic

* 04:30 – Very few people understand how much progress has been made: renewables are no longer “alternative”

* 8:00 – The story of Pakistan’s solar surge

* 11:00 – We’re in a different world because from steep learning curves for renewables and storage

* 14:00 – Energy as a service instead of a commodity

* 17:00 – Is the oil and gas industry getting what they wanted out of President Trump?

* 20:00 – China is adopting clean energy and dominating those industries

* 23:00 – Why leading with climate change is not a leading strategy

* 26:00 – Leading with benefits of new technologies in this “epochal moment”

* 29:00 – Not everyone can strike oil, but everyone can strike wind or sun (or both)

* 30:00 – Agrivoltaics: “shade is a valuable commodity”

* 34:00 – Sun Day: September 21

* 37:30 – June 2023: hottest month on record to that point AND first month when world installed one gigawatt per day

* 39:30 – Is it time for progressives to embrace permitting reform?

* 43:00 – Is progress more likely at federal or state & local levels?

* 48:30 – Closing Thoughts & Call to Action

Resources

Bill McKibben’s Work

* Book: Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben - (new release on the global solar revolution, packed with stories and stats).

* Substack: The Crucial Years: Bill’s ongoing essays on climate, energy, and activism.

* Sun Day! On the equinox: September 21

Articles and Essays Referenced

* The New Yorker (2025): Published an excerpt from Here Comes the Sun, surprising even seasoned climate experts with how fast solar is scaling.

* Telegraph article on Texas, including John Davis, former Texas Republican legislator, who said he “struck wind” on his Menard ranch — wind leases now account for 40% of his income.

* Mother Jones. Yes in Our Backyards — why it takes months in the U.S. but days in Australia.

* Dallas Federal Reserve Quarterly Survey: Candid insights from Texas oil and gas executives on drilling economics and policy.

Global and National Examples

* Pakistan rooftop solar boom: Citizens added the equivalent of half the national grid in just 8 months (Google Earth images showed rooftops filling with panels). Diesel sales dropped 35% in one year.

* California: Used 40% less natural gas for electricity than it did two years ago in summer 2023, evidence of rapid scaling of renewables.

* China: 1/2+ of all cars sold last month came with plugs. EVs there now cost as little as $12,000, far below U.S. prices.

* Australia: Rooftop solar installed as low as ~50 cents per watt vs. $1.50-3 or more in the U.S. due to faster, simpler permitting.

* Vatican City: Building a solar farm outside Rome to become the first fully solar-powered nation.

Concepts and Data Points

* “Costco vs. Whole Foods” analogy: Solar has shifted from being a premium product to being the cheapest and most abundant option.

* Agrivoltaics: Using solar arrays alongside farming. Examples include:

* Cattle grazing under turbines and sheep around solar panels.

* French vineyards report 60% higher grape yields with panels providing shade and moisture retention (pv magazine).

* Corn ethanol vs. solar comparison:

* 1 acre of corn for ethanol = ~25,000 miles of fuel for a Ford F-150.

* 1 acre of solar panels = ~700,000 miles in an F-150 Lightning EV.

* Balcony solar in Europe: Millions of apartment dwellers in Germany have adopted “plug-and-play” solar panels. Legal in Utah as of 2024 thanks to bipartisan legislation.

Organizations and Initiatives

* Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI) — Community Voices Survey found half of Texans are choosing between food, medicine, and power.

* Sunday: National Day of Action — September 21, 2025 (Fall Equinox). Learn more at sunday.earth.

* Conservatives for Clean Energy (Southeast U.S.): Helped persuade Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis not to block rooftop solar.

Podcasts and Media Recommendations

* Ezra Klein Show: Episode with Jesse Jenkins and Jane Flegal on energy transition and permitting reform (highly recommended).

* Energy Capital Podcast: Previous episode with Octopus Energy CEO on new utility business models.

Timestamps

Doug Lewin (00:06.722)

Welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Doug Lewin. My guest this week, I'm very excited to tell you, is Bill McKibben. I've been reading things that Bill has written for literally for decades. One of the smartest guys out there talking about issues related to energy, the environment, and climate literally for 40 years. And he has written a great book called Here Comes the Sun. By the time this comes out, the book will be available for general purchase wherever you buy books.

Doug Lewin (00:35.288)

do get it, I think you'll really like it. It's actually a pretty easy read, a couple hundred pages, not super long, but just absolutely dense, full of great vignettes and stories of Bill's travels to different places around the world and what he's seen going on with solar. Just a quick little stat that he drops into the book, The Economist in 2009, when we had 23 gigawatts of solar around the world, predicted it would take 20 years to increase that by an order of magnitude.

Doug Lewin (01:05.134)

It took six. And this year, well ahead of that 2030, we are installing that much solar, 230, 240 gigawatts every six months globally. Not only did it not take 20 years, we're deploying that much twice per year. This book is just full of all kinds of stuff like that. Pretty much every

Doug Lewin (01:27.916)

When they say or argument you hear about solar, there's too much land, it's not recycled and ends up in landfills. He takes on every single one of those in individual chapters. Really love this book. Do order it. But first, listen to my conversation with Bill. We obviously on brand talked a whole lot about Texas, but we talked about Pakistan and China and all sorts of places and aspects of the solar story around the world. I hope you enjoy it.

Doug Lewin (01:55.028)

As always, please, please, please leave us a five star review wherever you listen. It really does help grow the audience. Please share this with friends, families, and colleagues. And with that, please enjoy my conversation with Bill McKibben.

Doug Lewin (02:08.717)

Bill McKibben, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.

Bill McKibben (02:11.49)

Doug, what a pleasure to be with you and to get to say thanks in person for the amazing work you've been doing these last few years.

Doug Lewin (02:19.0)

Bill, that means so much coming from you. I've been reading your stuff for years, even decades. You're just a tremendous source of knowledge and wisdom and really appreciate you taking time to be on the podcast and appreciate you writing this fantastic book. Here Comes the Sun, which we'll, we'll, talk about a lot of different things, but obviously we're going to talk about the book. I can't recommend it highly enough. is.

Doug Lewin (02:42.434)

just a great shot in the arm, but kind of a shot in the arm, not shot out the arm. Let me correct that. Shot in the arm of optimism and sunny optimism. I gotta say though, this is like maybe a little out of character for you. So like what's going on? Why are you so hopeful and excited?

Bill McKibben (03:00.342)

Well, it is true. You know, I had the, some ways, maybe the bad luck to write the first book about what we now call the climate crisis, what we then called the greenhouse effect back in the 1980s. So in some ways, my career over 20 subsequent books has been professional bummer outer of people for which I make no apologies. This is the most important thing that's happened in the course of our species existence on the planet. And we need to understand it.

Bill McKibben (03:30.694)

Finally, right now, even though from my point of view, there are many, many, many big bad things happening in our country and on our planet. In certain ways, I never remember a moment more fraught than this one. I am saddened by what's going on in our nation. And I have the interesting task at this moment of helping bring people news of the one big good thing.

Bill McKibben (03:59.298)

that's happening on planet Earth. And that's finally, finally the breakout of clean energy, the thing that we've been waiting for and hoping for and working for for a very long time. And now a combination of activism and engineering has brought us to a moment when there's this extraordinary thing happening. And my experience is that

Bill McKibben (04:29.076)

almost nobody knows about it. know, a cut from this book came out in the New Yorker earlier this summer, long chunk. And I heard from person after person, and I'm talking about people who've been very active in the energy climate world for a very long time. And they were saying the same thing over and over again. I had no idea that this was happening. I had no idea how fast this was going. And I think that it's one of

Bill McKibben (04:58.018)

The really important points that we have to get across right now for all kinds of important political reasons is this stuff is no longer alternative energy. We should toss that framing far away. We should tear down the walls of that particular ghetto. This is the common sense, straightforward, obvious way to power the planet going forward.

Bill McKibben (05:27.81)

There's a very good reason that 95 % of the new generation capacity on planet Earth last year was clean energy, sun, wind, batteries. And I mean, you're close to a big part of that story in the Lone Star State, which in some ways, as I say in the book, is the most amazing part of that story, since it's happening literally in the hydrocarbon capital of planet Earth.

Bill McKibben (05:57.514)

And yet the economics are so remarkable that even without what should be all kinds of obvious reasons to support it environmentally, it's nonetheless making its case. So it's not that I think we're out of the woods. It's not even that I think we're necessarily going to do this in this country. It's that for the very first time in the four decades where we've been worried about climate change,

Bill McKibben (06:26.572)

We have something that's scalable in ways that'll make a difference. The fact that California is using 40 % less natural gas to produce electricity this summer than they were two years ago is the single most optimistic statistic that I've heard. Those are the kind of numbers that if they spread around the world, start to knock tens of a degree.

Bill McKibben (06:54.356)

of how hot the planet eventually gets. And at the same time, they're liberating lots and lots of people from their dependence on expensive and precarious sources of energy is a beautiful part of that story too.

Doug Lewin (07:10.87)

Yeah. You know, look, I think one of the things that I think is so interesting about this moment, and you just hit on it directly when you were talking about the New Yorker article, right, that like, I still feel like this is not known. When people talk about alternative energy, they still generally mean wind and solar. We really do need to turn that upside down. Like gas is becoming alternative energy. Doesn't mean it's not valuable and we won't use it sometimes, but it's kind of the alternative. And then the economics, which I think, I think it was chapter four, which was probably my...

Doug Lewin (07:40.322)

favorite chapter because I'm such a nerd and I love the economic stuff and you just lay it out so well. And I think the chapter right after that, you get into can the rest of the world afford it? Because you hear that all the time, right? This almost like trope that's rolled out all the time. They're like, well, there's no way Africa is ever going to get to the level of prosperity that we have unless there's fossil fuels. And it's like, that's crazy. It's exactly upside down because you need big...

Doug Lewin (08:05.278)

centralized infrastructure in the world has failed over and over and over again to build that kind of scale in Africa, but decentralized, like the move we made in telecom to mobile phones, like that actually has a chance of working. Let me, it looks like you want to say something. I will let you respond to that. There is a question in there, but go ahead and respond and then I'll ask.

Bill McKibben (08:26.926)

I just

Bill McKibben (08:27.126)

want to say, I think you're absolutely right. And you can tell because people, as it were, voting with their feet or with their rooftops. The story that really just blew my mind was what happened in Pakistan over the last year or so. About a year ago in Pakistan, energy analysts started saying something weird is happening because demand for electricity on the national grid is dropping. As you know, as an energy analyst,

Bill McKibben (08:56.812)

Humans never use less energy. Demand number always goes up, they say. So the fact that it was dropping was befuddling what was happening here. And then good analysts started looking at pictures on Google Earth. And if you looked at the rooftops of Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad, you could literally watch solar panels spreading like mushrooms after a rainstorm in the woods.

Bill McKibben (09:25.718)

The growth was literally week to week. In the course of eight months last year, Pakistanis built the equivalent of half the country's national electric grid by themselves. And when I talked to people and said, how did people even manage to do it? Obviously, the key component was cheap Chinese solar panels coming across the border with China. how did they put them up? Well, it turns out that there are three or 400 great

Bill McKibben (09:55.192)

TikTok videos with Hindustani music in the background where people explain how to snap this stuff together and how to put it up. DIY. the bottom line there, the number that killed me was that, I mean, I've spent some time in rural Asia. So I know that the soundtrack of Village Asia is diesel generators humming along to pump those deep tube wells that were the residue of the Green Revolution in the 60s.

Bill McKibben (10:23.084)

That diesel is usually the biggest input for farmers. It's expensive. Farmers were the first people to really start doing this in Pakistan. They often lack the money to build the steel supports that we're used to seeing for solar panels. They're just buying them, laying them on the ground, pointing them at the sun. Diesel sales dropped 35 % last year in Pakistan. In one year, those are the kind of numbers that

Bill McKibben (10:52.632)

change the world.

Doug Lewin (10:53.814)

Absolutely. And I, you know, I had a sense that we were quote unquote winning. And I want to talk about what winning means in a minute, because I don't mean that, you know, team jerseys, like it's not a zero sum game. Humanity, all of us are winning. When I started to hear more and more that oil and gas operators in the Permian basin were trying to hook up to the grid as fast as they could to abandon those diesel generation, gensets and units, because it is more expensive to use those and.

Doug Lewin (11:23.138)

the input cost of producing a barrel of oil includes the cost of the energy it takes to actually, so it was kind of like, I mean, I had seen all the numbers and I knew solar was coming, but that was one of those moments where I kind of went, shit, this is really happening.

Bill McKibben (11:36.384)

It is just fascinating. And it's going to take us a while to wrap our heads around it because we're so used to the idea of energy as commodity, as something that you go discover and put in reserves. the idea that energy now is going to be more than anything else, kind of the product of human intelligence. The fact that the learning curves are so steady and so steep.

Bill McKibben (12:05.87)

for these technologies, that they get cheaper and cheaper with each passing quarter. Most of the global warming era, we lived in a world where fossil fuel was cheap and clean energy was expensive. That's why so much activism had to be about trying to put price on carbon, trying to divest from fossil fuels so that the cost of capital would rise, trying to slow the expansion of

Bill McKibben (12:35.106)

fossil fuel infrastructure on and on. But sometime about five years ago, we crossed that line, that flipped, and now we're in a different world, and the parameters of that world are going to keep shifting in the same direction. Fossil fuel is not on a learning curve. Fossil fuel was always pretty cheap, but if anything, it gets more expensive because now you have to go...

Bill McKibben (13:01.262)

deep beneath the ocean or down and frack the subsurface geology or whatever it is to get at it. mean, the coal is further back in the coal mine and it takes more effort to get. This stuff just gets easier all the time. The one real critique of the economics here, I think, is that it's almost so cheap that it's difficult to make a

Bill McKibben (13:25.282)

big profit on it. And so it's going to be more difficult to mobilize some of the investment if that's sort of how we're doing it. You've seen Brett Christopher's good book about this, The Price is Wrong, but the price is so cheap that I think places like China are quickly figuring out that the whole world looks different on the other side. Manufacturing.

Bill McKibben (13:49.814)

like just the daily cost of living, like all the things that we do in this world with energy become so radically less expensive once we've built this out, that it's as if you're living in a different world.

Doug Lewin (14:04.556)

Yeah, it's interesting. still think there's going be plenty of opportunities, entrepreneurial opportunities. just, it is, I think, a move away from the commodity, as you talked about a minute ago, and more to services. And this was the most recent podcast I just put out was with the CEO of Octopus. And I did one with Base Power. These kinds of companies that are starting to think of, what do people really want beyond the commodity? Because if the commodity becomes so cheap, which

Doug Lewin (14:34.09)

It might. It's happening. It's still, I think, debatable whether or not that happens, right? But certainly the evidence is pointing that way. So then it kind of becomes what are the services you can offer and how do you actually...

Bill McKibben (14:45.688)

There was an instructive story in the paper yesterday about one of the big Australian utility coal firms making a huge investment in batteries, just saying, clearly one of our markets is disappearing and another is emerging. I think in general, not to sound too hippy-dippy about all this, but I do think that there's something fascinating about imagining a world that runs on energy that can't really be hoarded.

Bill McKibben (15:15.048)

over long times held in reserve. It's a fun mental game to play to try and think what the geopolitics of planet Earth would have been like over the last 50 years if oil was not a particularly valuable product. I mean, human beings are good at fighting about things, but even human beings are going to have a hard time figuring out how you fight a war over sunshine. So there are some big interesting differences emerging.

Bill McKibben (15:44.458)

And of course, I'm not the only one that realizes that, nor you. Much of American politics over the last year is explicable by the fact that people in the oil and gas industry looked at the fact that California was suddenly using 40 % less natural gas and panicked. It was just about exactly a year ago that candidate Trump was saying, give me a billion dollars and you can have anything you want to the oil industry.

Bill McKibben (16:14.394)

They ponied up more like half a billion when you add in all the advertising and lobbying and direct donations. Clearly that was enough, but they're getting everything that they wanted. But my...

Doug Lewin (16:28.546)

Well, sort of, no, actually it's really fascinating. Yeah, they're getting some of what they wanted, with some of like the, well, some of them, not to paint with too broad a brush with the IRA repeals and some of that kind of stuff. but I think this is a really important, but like the drill baby drill stuff does not work to them to your whole point of like, you need some scarcity for higher prices. And one of the things I love and I recommend it to anybody who's interested in energy.

Bill McKibben (16:31.938)

They're getting all the policy they want.

Doug Lewin (16:55.766)

is look at the regular reports that come out of the Dallas Federal Reserve, which really tracks oil and gas. And they do a quarterly survey and they publish the comments they get. And the comments are withering, know, like oil and gas executives just saying the policy of this administration towards oil and gas doesn't make sense. I think there's some buyer's remorse. And we heard this before the election. Exxon CEO said, gave an interview on CNBC and said,

Doug Lewin (17:21.472)

I don't know what drill baby drill is a policy actually means because once you drill enough, then the prices go down and what happens when the prices go down, people don't drill as much. So you get caught in a quandary there.

Bill McKibben (17:31.606)

Well, yes. And truthfully, I think that they waited too long. We're past the point of no return at some level in the transition to clean energy, partly because it's such a global phenomenon. I think the interesting thing to watch is going to be what happens with LNG export, because clearly that's where this industry has based its growth story on going forward. We're going to export

Bill McKibben (17:59.946)

endless amounts of LNG out of the Gulf of Mexico to the rest of the world. And obviously Trump is doing his best to help with that. You know, place after place, the tariff negotiation has ended up with people promising to buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of LNG. But my guess is that while that may be a short term boost, a kind of sugar high, it's probably not going to last.

Bill McKibben (18:26.772)

A, because it's running counter to these economics, but B, because if you're the ruler of some Asian country someplace and you look at this, do you really want your energy future tied to the increasingly fickle and erratic American government? Do you really want to put yourself in a place where Donald Trump can decide that your Supreme Court did something he didn't like and so he's cutting you off? My guess is that you're going to see

Bill McKibben (18:56.18)

almost the opposite reaction of what they want over time.

Doug Lewin (18:59.618)

There's a lot of different businesses, a lot of different sectors, including energy, where folks are asking themselves, do you want to rely on the fickleness of the American government right now? But to come back to the point of LNG, and this is where I do think we will see gas become more and more of that alternative energy is because again, the more you export, the more scarce it becomes and the higher the price goes. right. And we see this EIA just came out with a couple of days ago, a new

Doug Lewin (19:25.9)

short-term outlook that has gas prices up in the four and a half, five dollar range. The last two years, it's been like two bucks. So it's weird. We're actually seeing, you talked about gas being down in California, and that's part of the reason it is more expensive this year. We're seeing solar and wind way up in Texas. Unfortunately, we're seeing coal up too, and gas down, because demand is rising so much faster here than California. We're seeing everything rise except for gas, and that's with it only being like,

Doug Lewin (19:54.69)

three and a half, four bucks. If it gets to four and a half, five, think you see even more solar and wind. I want to pivot a little bit, but did you have anything you want to add to that? is it okay if I pivot?

Bill McKibben (20:05.55)

Bill McKibben (20:05.91)

No, just to say, I do think that it's really important for people to bear in mind what a global story this is. And it's not just the energy sources themselves, it's the appliances that make use of them. So the fact that half the cars sold in China last month came with plugs dangling from the end is an extraordinary part of this story. There's no story

Doug Lewin (20:34.247)

And they're not going back, right? It's not like it's gonna dip below 50%. It's only going up from here.

Bill McKibben (20:39.158)

Once you've built the infrastructure, mean, these are, the story is these are better machines, you know, an electric vehicle is a better, I've driven one for years. I would never go back for anything, nor would I get rid of the heat pump in my house and replace it with a furnace and an air conditioner. You know, this is better stuff that also happily happens to be better for the world. But any story about global oil demand 10 years down the road depends on

Bill McKibben (21:07.998)

everybody in China deciding they want to drive, I don't know what, a Bronco or something with a gas tank. And that's just not going to happen. In fact, the opposite is going to happen.

Doug Lewin (21:19.15)

they

Doug Lewin (21:19.31)

would have to pay like 40, 50,000 bucks for, especially after the tariffs the other way. And then like the electric vehicles in China are down to 10, $15,000 for like a really, really nice car.

Bill McKibben (21:30.574)

12 grand, you can buy a car that does stuff American cars can't do. The future now, sadly, gets written at the Shanghai auto show, not the Detroit auto show. And all of this, I will just add, as a patriotic American, pisses me off. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. My summer job was giving tours of the battle green, where the American idea was first defended in blood.

Doug Lewin (21:59.02)

I've been there. It's a great site, by the way. I loved it there. It was awesome.

Bill McKibben (22:02.316)

And

Bill McKibben (22:02.446)

the fact that the country that invented the solar cell and the country that invented the lithium ion battery is just surrendering. It's not that China is going to eat our lunch. It's we're catering the lunch. We're sending over a bunch of waiters in red caps to serve lunch to the Chinese. And it is absolutely maddening and should be to any red-blooded American to watch that happen.

Doug Lewin (22:33.078)

Yeah, we're going to put a pin in that. Hopefully we'll have time to come back to that. not, we'll be back on the podcast at some point in the future. We'll talk about electrostates versus petrostates and what it means that China is dominating the supply chain for not just EVs and solar panels, but transformers. There's a big, big issue there that we've got to deal with as a country. But I don't want to lose the earlier point, which you were just saying, this was the pivot I wanted to make and you made it excellently, which is the EVs are better, the heat pumps are better.

Doug Lewin (23:01.976)

This to me, we're at a critical inflection point in dealing with climate change. That if we lead with climate change, and it feels like, I mean, you pretty much said this in the book. You certainly were like going right up to it. And I think even beyond it, like pushing the boundaries here a little bit. I want to push the boundaries a little further, Bill. And look, I want to be really clear. We can't ignore the climate science. I spend a good part of my, any given week reading what's coming out and different climate scientists, Andrew Dessler down here in Texas.

Doug Lewin (23:30.38)

I could give a long list of the people that I look to that are really, really smart. Also in Texas, thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, we've got a-

Bill McKibben (23:33.486)

and hey ho.

Bill McKibben (23:37.166)

You've

Bill McKibben (23:37.488)

got a good Texas contingent.

Doug Lewin (23:39.34)

I really could, I'm going to stop myself from naming them because then I'd leave somebody out and somebody will get mad at me. But they're Legion and they're smart and the contribution they're making is important and it should not be ignored. And when we think about the mass of people, right, the general public that is not reading about climate science, they're trying to live their lives. More than half of Texans are struggling to pay their energy bill because it's too high.

Doug Lewin (24:06.936)

There was a great survey out of Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute. I'm going to have Margo, the director of that organization, on the podcast next month. It'll be a must listen. They did this community voices energy survey right at about 50 % of Texans are reporting that they're choosing between their food, medicine, and power. And I think if we lead with climate change, it's very depressing. It is a hard thing. It is complicated, and it is depressing as hell.

Doug Lewin (24:36.18)

And so people are just like, I have so many problems in my life and now you want me to deal with this and I have no power to deal with that. Now flip that around and say, hey, what is happening to deal with climate change? You don't even have to think about it to deal with climate change. These are technologies that lower your energy costs, give you a better, smoother, faster ride in your car, keep your house more comfortable at lower cost in extreme heat, especially winter, whatever.

Doug Lewin (25:05.996)

Like that pivot, I feel like is where you're going here. It would just had me so excited reading this book because you obviously are a pivotal figure within those that are working on climate change. think we have to get back to like, what is the purpose? Where does this end? What is the vision? What is the light at the end of that tunnel? If we successfully deal with climate change, it's not. Privation and higher prices and

Doug Lewin (25:35.82)

You know, you're putting on extra layers to stay warm in the winter. It's none of that. It's actually energy abundance, really an end of scarcity for a lot of different things.

Bill McKibben (25:47.67)

So I think you're absolutely on the right track. I want to say a few things about climate that I think are important here. I don't think it's going to go away in any way, in part because those feelings of privation are now directly linked to what's happening to the climate. mean, the fact that Texans are having to use so much expensive energy has a lot to do with the fact that the temperature now pins at 100 degrees beginning in May and stays there till October.

Bill McKibben (26:16.574)

and obviously comes with all the kind of tragedies that you all have dealt with in the Hill Country. I also think that human beings are complicated and that we make a mistake sometimes in assuming that we work just on a kind of economic cost benefit analysis when we think about the world. Humans like to be engaged in the process of making the world a better place. care deeply about

Bill McKibben (26:43.47)

a world that works better for their kids and such. And that's why it's exciting that the one thing that we can do about climate change also happens to be a beautiful thing that we can do for everybody's future. The epochal moment that we're at shouldn't be washed over. Right now, in the 2020s, after 700,000 years of humans merrily setting things on fire,

Bill McKibben (27:13.312)

we're at a point where we don't need to do that anymore. And that comes with extraordinary benefits. The climate is perhaps the most abstract of those. One of the least abstract is that we don't need to be causing hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma across this country every year anymore by sending up the cloud of particulates that come when you burn fossil fuel. That's a big help.

Bill McKibben (27:40.64)

especially in places that are hot and poor. But we also have this chance of building a future that is in our own control, which is another thing of great emotional appeal to people. Most people don't have their own supply of coal or gas or oil, you know, at least since John D Rockefeller, a great deal of the intense and now

Bill McKibben (28:07.842)

grotesque inequality that marks our planet has derived from the fact that we depend on these few outcroppings of fossil fuel scattered around the world. The people who control them become richer and more powerful than is wise for our democracy or wise for our economy. Imagining a world where instead communities

Bill McKibben (28:33.814)

have some control over that. I was so struck by your reporting earlier this year during the state legislature session in Texas when people started appearing out of rural Texas saying, don't do this stuff on solar. This is how we pay for our schools now. That revenue source is what keeps our otherwise remote rural impoverished community going.

Bill McKibben (29:01.858)

That could be true for the entire...

Doug Lewin (29:04.726)

I just want interject to say at one of my favorite phrases that I've just ever heard on anything is from John Davis, a former Republican legislator. was a chairman in the house, Republican in the aughts and I think into the early teens. He's got a ranch out in Menard about three hours west of Austin. There's no oil and gas on his ranch. It's he's a, I think he's fourth generation, maybe fifth. And he was getting ready to like get to the point where he was not going to be able to keep his ranch. He just couldn't keep up with the expenses of it.

Doug Lewin (29:34.414)

Cattle wasn't bringing enough money in. was heartbroken, but it was like, was a financial decision he's gonna have to make. And then he said, as he describes it, I struck wind. He didn't strike oil, he struck wind. He's got seven wind turbines. There's a great article in the Telegraph, we'll put a link in the show notes where he says, you know, 40 % of his income now is coming from those seven wind turbines. And the cattle graze right around the wind turbines and don't have any problems. This whole thing of like taking away farmland, like.

Doug Lewin (30:02.092)

The cattle are perfectly happy. They go and get shade from the tower at certain times of the day, and that's about all that affects them.

Bill McKibben (30:09.026)

Let's don't overlook that at all, because it turns out that that's one of the really fun parts of this story.

Doug Lewin (30:15.252)

end of your book, by the way. The whole section on land is just so well done. Yeah.

Bill McKibben (30:19.636)

Agrivoltaics, we live on an overheating planet where shade is actually a really useful commodity all of a sudden. you don't have to look very far on the internet to find lots of pictures of sheep and cows happily lolling in the shade of solar panels. I will say to anybody listening that the word to the wise, don't put your goats in there. They like to the cables and they enjoy trying to jump up on the panels themselves.

Bill McKibben (30:48.856)

keep the goats away, but everything, mean, the French have figured out that they're increasing yields of wine grapes 60 % by sticking them in fields where you get more shade and of course more moisture retention as a result. And I think that this part of the story, people are starting to understand a little better. If I go to my grave having only explained one thing, it would be that we could take

Doug Lewin (30:51.32)

Cheap work fine. Yes, not.

Bill McKibben (31:18.37)

the land currently used to grow ethanol in this country and cover it with solar panels and provide more energy than the US will ever use. The insanity was driven home for me standing in a field in Illinois with a farmer who put part of his acreage into solar. He said, you know, we grew a lot of ethanol, a lot of corn for ethanol here. One acre of corn grown for ethanol every year produces enough

Bill McKibben (31:48.216)

to drive my Ford F-150 about 25,000 miles. So not nothing, but one acre of that same land covered with solar panels with other stuff in between, but covered with solar panels produces enough electricity to take my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version, not 25,000 miles, but about 700,000 miles. When you start getting those kind of figures in your head, you'd get the sense

Bill McKibben (32:17.634)

of what's possible here. And you get the sense of how easily this can and does cross ideological lines. That's what I've been loving about your reporting from Austin. And it's not the only place. One of my favorite stories this year is about, and it's not like a crucial central part of the solar story, but it's a really good one. In the last couple of years across Europe, this stuff called balcony solar has just taken off for apartment dwellers.

Bill McKibben (32:46.336)

is apparently several million Germans have gone to whatever the German equivalent of Best Buy is and plunked down a few hundred euros and come home with a solar panel that they hang from the balcony and just plug straight into the wall. And they're producing 20 % of the power they use maybe. That's illegal everywhere in this country, except in that progressive bastion Utah, where two months ago,

Bill McKibben (33:15.444)

a libertarian state senator said, why can the people of Hamburg and Frankfurt do this and not the good people of Salt Lake and Provo? You know, I don't like this. so unanimously, the state legislature passed the enabling legislation. And I now have a steady diet of videos on YouTube of Utahns hanging their balconies, solar panels off and plugging them in and generating power. If you're a good liberal, you may

Bill McKibben (33:44.65)

love the idea that we're networking the groovy power of the sun. If you're my home is my castle kind of guy, you may like the idea that you're now actually independent of the big powers and able to, you know, run your own.

Doug Lewin (34:00.046)

Maybe

Doug Lewin (34:00.306)

you like both, Absolutely. we can take both.

Bill McKibben (34:03.412)

We're all Americans, so we have a little bit of all of this in us. And it's why we're doing this Sunday thing in September, this big national day of action on September 21st, the fall equinox, just to try and drive this message home. And we kipped it off with a little ceremony at Old North Church in Boston, where we hung a solar powered green lantern up in Paul Revere's steeple because

Bill McKibben (34:31.479)

This is such a possibility. And that kind of liberation story, revolution story, is so akin to what I've always thought of as the kind of American spirit. And so antithetical to what at the moment I think too many people are perceiving as where we just try to hold on and never change to what we have now. You know, if we're...

Bill McKibben (34:59.63)

the country on coal, then we're going to power it on coal forever. Well, I mean, you know, as I say, I grew up in Lexington. If that had been our, we'd still be speaking with British accents and sending money off to the king.

Doug Lewin (35:12.694)

and using whale oil and kerosene and yeah.

Bill McKibben (35:16.236)

Yeah, yeah. This is the moment. And it's great fun for me. My other identity, in a sense, I guess, is as a Christian. I've been a Methodist Sunday school teacher much of my life and that sort of thing. And so I love the idea that we're getting energy from heaven, not from hell, you know, that the good Lord saw fit to hang this big ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky. And now we have the wit to make

Bill McKibben (35:46.262)

use of it. I was very taken by the news a couple of weeks ago that Vatican City is now going to become the first fully solar powered nation on earth. just broke ground on a big solar farm outside Rome. And given the nature of solar power, within a few months, they will have finished this project and the Vatican City will be running all on solar power. So for me, the climate story is this.

Bill McKibben (36:15.774)

in the middle of all of this. And the only reason that we're doing the kind of activism that we're doing is we have to make this transition as quickly as possible. Unlike our other political issues, the thing that makes it different is it's one that comes with a hard physical deadline. Once we melt the whole Arctic, it's not like someone has a plan for how we're going to freeze it back up again.

Bill McKibben (36:43.246)

And that's about where we are now. We're watching in real time the degradation of the climate. So absent that, we could all just sit back. I could sit back and say, well, 40 years from now, we're going to run the planet on sun and wind because it's so obviously economically the thing to do. And economics eventually erodes politics and wins.

Bill McKibben (37:10.402)

The trouble is, is if it takes us anything like 40 years, then the planet that we run on sun and wind and batteries is going to be a broken planet. So that's the one place where I think we need to keep reminding ourselves that this good news story is happening at the same time as a very bad news story. And they're very deeply connected. So deeply connected that it's almost like a Hollywood script. June of

Bill McKibben (37:40.142)

2023 was the month when temperatures around the world really began this acceleration, this spike. That was the month when climatologists were saying, this is the hottest temperature we've seen in 125,000 years. And every month since has been the hottest October, the second hottest May, whatever. We've stayed up at this very elevated place.

Bill McKibben (38:07.278)

June of 2023 was also literally the same month when human beings started putting up more than a gigawatts worth of solar panels every day around the world. A gigawatt being the, I mean, one can talk about nameplate capacity on it, but being the rough equivalent of a coal fired power plant or something. A very large one, yeah. So these two things are happening right now. And we have no idea how this race comes out.

Bill McKibben (38:36.094)

We know that we're not going to stop global warming. It's too late for that. Much damage already done, much more to come. But what we're playing for is the ability to stop it short of the place where it just cuts civilizations off at the knees. And even that's an open question and we don't know. But I think that your original point was right, that by itself, that has not been enough to move our political system.

Bill McKibben (39:04.276)

in the ways that we would need it to move. This is an extraordinary opportunity that comes with cheap, clean energy. And so the shorthand that I've been using for people that help get it across is to say, we've spent a long time thinking of this stuff as like the whole foods of energy. It's nice, but it's pricey. We need to get it through everybody's minds that this is the Costco of energy. It's cheap.

Bill McKibben (39:33.354)

It's available in bulk. It's on the shelf, ready to go.

Doug Lewin (39:37.4)

So, it hasn't been enough politically. I want to read a little part. This is from towards the end of the book, not right at the end, but a little quote you had here. said, we're finding enthusiasts around the world, not for net zero by 2050 or dramatic reductions in carbon emissions or any of the other phrases that have come to define the climate debate. It's not that those things aren't important. They are. It's that they don't really offer a positive vision of the world we might build.

Doug Lewin (40:05.544)

I agree with this a thousand percent. And I want to tie this together with what I thought was just a great podcast that I recommend everybody listen to. The Ezra Klein Show, the one he did with Jesse Jenkins and Jane Flagel, who I think are two of the brightest minds in energy out there. You were just talking a minute ago, Bill, about Utah and about what is effectively a little bit of a deregulatory action, right? Making it easier for people to plug and play a solar panel.

Doug Lewin (40:35.456)

If it's configured that way and it can work in a normal socket and provide power, again, they're doing this all over the world. It's not dangerous. Why wouldn't we give the people the freedom to do that? Basically, what I'm getting at is we are getting to a point that to deal effectively with climate change, to deal effectively with the rising temperatures and the heat and all that comes from that, we are going to have to build a lot.

Doug Lewin (41:03.914)

And the environmental movement has existed for decades to really stop infrastructure from being, but that's, that's an oversimplification hasn't existed a hundred percent for that. But I think it's fair to say a lot of the orientation of the environmental movement. And it's not, I'm not saying that as like a bad thing. There was a move in Texas 20 years ago to build 11 coal plants. I was.

Doug Lewin (41:26.304)

a long time ago, like trying to stop those. And I'm glad I did. We shouldn't have built those. So it's not a bad thing to stop some infrastructure from being built. But now we're at this point where like, my God, to get out of the mess we're in, we got to build and we got to build a lot. And I just wrote an article on this talking about energy pragmatism and how maybe it's not crazy. Although there's a little voice inside my head telling me it is crazy to think we could get any sort of bipartisan

Doug Lewin (41:55.006)

energy, you only have to read any newspaper any day, it'd be like, how is that possibly going to happen? But we've been polarized before and energy does seem to be an area where bipartisan agreement can happen. But that of course means that progressives are going to have to give something to get something. So you could take any part of that when you want, but I think the main question is, is this a time where progressives, where people that are concerned about climate change

Doug Lewin (42:22.36)

should be actively working with conservatives on what motivates them to come up with some kind of a bipartisan energy framework that might be able to propel us forward.

Bill McKibben (42:33.422)

Sure. First thing is I've done a lot of writing in the last couple of years about just what you're talking about. And with the case I've been trying to make, among other things, is that people who, like me, old white people should stop suing to stop things they don't like. Solar farms, wind, you know, I am so tired of the I don't want to look at it argument, which actually is behind an awful lot of the opposition to renewable energy. And it's shameful at this point and should be abandoned.

Bill McKibben (43:04.694)

I don't think, frankly, anything useful is going to happen in Washington. I see no sign. Politics aside, it just seems to me that the place has been abandoned to a kind of nonlinear uninteresting thinking in every way. But I do think that state by state and city by city across this country, there are all kinds of ways to work this out. One of the things we're really concentrating on at Sunday is

Bill McKibben (43:33.678)

permitting reform at the local and state level. Because among other things, mean, and this is sort of most obvious with rooftop solar, our system's just absurd. I mean, if you live in Australia or Belgium or something, you can call up the contractor on Monday and say, I want solar panels on my roof. And by Friday, they're up there plugged into the grid producing power. Here, it's a months long odyssey. dollar a watt in Australia. at a third the price.

Bill McKibben (44:03.118)

50 cents a watt increasingly in Australia. mean, it's really unbelievable. And as it turns out, I wrote a long piece for the progressive magazine Mother Jones, pointing out that this is mostly down to absurd regulation. We have 15,000 municipalities and county commissions and stuff that all have their own sets of codes. do these inspections on the roof as if you were building something dangerous. Clearly, this is...

Bill McKibben (44:32.448)

not dangerous. If there were an epidemic of solar panel rooftop fires across Australia, trust me, Fox News would be covering them 24 seven. Okay. This is no more dangerous than putting in a refrigerator, but we treat it as if it's, you know, I even know what someone wants applying to build like a toxic waste dump on their roof.

Doug Lewin (44:54.412)

It's an electrical appliance and we have batteries in all like at our computers at our phones and that we treat a battery in the garage.

Bill McKibben (45:02.026)

used to doing this and so able to do it. And so I think we can change those things in lots of places. And I've really been enjoying working sort of across, there's a group called Conservatives for Clean Energy in the Southeast. They were really the ones who persuaded Governor DeSantis in Florida not to put the kibosh on solar there. And the Sunshine State is actually now beginning to put up

Bill McKibben (45:29.462)

solar at a semi-respectable rate.

Doug Lewin (45:32.366)

It's literally called the Sunshine State.

Bill McKibben (45:35.266)

Yes. One of the things that always amuses me is that Vermont, where I am, which is not the sunshine state, has for decades had one of the highest levels of solar penetration in the country, just because people are that way. But we can do this. And so I think that your analysis is correct. And I think that if and when...

Bill McKibben (46:00.436)

sanity returns to Washington, it will probably return with a kind of different flavor of thought around that kind of regulation. That said, the baleful effect that the fossil fuel industry has on our political life is just worth bearing in mind all the time. And they're very good at taking things and twisting them in their favor. So the one part of the IRA

Bill McKibben (46:30.104)

that is going to survive, for instance, is the boondoggle stuff that Joe Manchin put in at the behest of the fossil fuel industry. We're gonna spend tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars on what are really kind of absurd, expensive projects like carbon capture from coal-fired power plants and things like that. Money that if you spent it on renewable energy would return.

Bill McKibben (46:56.526)

10 times the climate benefits, but also 10 times the economic benefits. So I understand why people are reluctant to help an industry on the decline try and maintain its advantage through political gamesmanship. That said, this is a transition. And there are communities that depend on fossil fuel and people that... And we need to figure out how to make that work. Exactly right.

Doug Lewin (47:20.91)

lot of them in Texas.

Bill McKibben (47:26.22)

We need to figure out how to make that work, and I think we can. I think the thing that we can't figure out how to make work is a forever return for Exxon's shareholders. I was really struck last year when Darren Wood said, quite frankly, in response to the obvious question, why don't you guys build a lot of renewable energy or an energy company?

Bill McKibben (47:51.234)

He said, we don't do it because it doesn't offer above average returns for our investors. They've had a hundred years to realize above average returns. It's about time for the rest of us to realize the kind of savings and freedom that comes from not relying on energy that can be hoarded, held in reserve, doled out month by month for another check.

Doug Lewin (48:18.092)

I know I need to let you go in a minute. Two quick points, and then I'm going to ask you if there's anything else you want to say before we end. One, Exxon is investing in lithium mining in certainly in Arkansas, maybe in Northeast Texas. even they're changing. Two, I think as far as DC goes, obviously nobody has a high opinion of Congress right now. mean, the polling puts Congress slightly below the plague or something like that. But I think there are, particularly in the Senate,

Doug Lewin (48:48.172)

A lot of folks that understand that if we severely limit the build out of wind and solar, it will affect many of our other national goals, including winning the AI race with China, which is very important to the Trump administration and a lot of folks in Congress. like, still have this like, it may be a very thin thread of hope that there might be some ability to have a bipartisan bill like in 2005, like in 2007, 2015.

Doug Lewin (49:18.05)

So I'll let you respond to that and then, I know I need to let you go if there's anything else you want to say.

Bill McKibben (49:22.126)

Bill McKibben (49:22.967)

I'll just say, I hope a few of them grow a spine and are willing to stand up to the White House on some of this. Yes. And we'll see. But that's why we're doing things like Sunday. It's really important to demonstrate across the country that there's an understanding and a desire for this future. And if we change the politics even in small ways, then that has the possibility for the kind of outcomes that you're describing.

Doug Lewin (49:52.334)

Bill, if people want to know more about Sunday, they can go to, what is it, sunday.earth? And it's going to happen on September 21st. Is that right?

Bill McKibben (49:59.174)

Sunday.Earth.

Bill McKibben (50:00.235)

Exactly right. You got it just right. Doug, let me just say such thanks for what you do. You're doing it in the most important place in the world and just in exactly the right key. So many, many thanks.

Doug Lewin (50:13.902)

really

Doug Lewin (50:14.102)

appreciate you. We will put links to where folks can read your excellent sub stack. Can't recommend that highly enough. And then here comes the sun, depending on when we put this out, it'll either already be out or you could pre-order it.

Bill McKibben (50:27.574)

It's

Bill McKibben (50:27.875)

out next week, so yeah, I am glad you enjoyed it.

Doug Lewin (50:31.352)

So it'll probably already be out. Make sure you order it and we'll put links to other places people can find you. Bill, thanks so much for doing this. This was a pleasure. Thank you.

Bill McKibben (50:39.054)

Our

Bill McKibben (50:39.545)

real pleasure. Thank you all. Take care.

Doug Lewin (50:43.288)

Thanks for tuning in to the Energy Capital Podcast. If you got something out of this conversation, please share the podcast with a friend, family member or colleague and subscribe to the newsletter at douglouen.com. That's where you'll find all the stories where I break down the biggest things happening in Texas energy, national energy policy, markets, technology policy. It's all there. You can also follow along at LinkedIn.

Doug Lewin (51:07.486)

You can find me there and at Twitter, Doug Lewin Energy, as well as YouTube, Doug Lewin Energy. Please follow me in all the places. Big thanks to Nathan Peevee, our producer, for making these episodes sound so crystal clear and good, and to Ari Lewin for writing the music. Until next time, please stay curious and stay engaged. Let's keep building a better energy future. Thanks for listening.

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Here Comes the Sun: Bill McKibben on Solar’s Breakout Moment

Energy Capital Podcast (private feed for [email protected])

Here Comes the Sun: Bill McKibben on Solar’s Breakout Moment