Yale Climate Connections reports:

Bill McKibben is like that old culture of yeast you revive when you want to start a new batch of sourdough. He makes movements rise.

McKibben is a cofounder and senior adviser of climate activist group 350.org, the founder of Third Act – a climate and democracy group led by U.S. residents over the age of 60 – and the principal instigator behind Sun Day, a nationwide community celebration of solar energy on September 21.

His power as an activist stems from his craft as a writer. McKibben still contributes pieces to The New Yorker, the iconic magazine that serialized Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 and then launched his own career by serializing “The End of Nature” in 1989. That book, his first, can fairly be described as the first work of popular nonfiction about climate change. Since then, McKibben has published more than 20 books, including his 2007 manifesto for a just and sustainable economic system, “Deep Economy,” and his 2022 look back at his “suburban boyhood,” when he sang in the church choir and led American Revolution tours of his historic New England town, “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon.” Since 2022, McKibben has also written for his Substack site, “The Crucial Years.”

McKibben’s new book, “Here Comes the Sun,” is a sober yet upbeat look at “a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization.” In the book, McKibben argues that now that solar is the most affordable form of energy anywhere on the planet, we have an unprecedented opportunity to scale up climate action to the level required for planetary effect. It is an opportunity, a moment, that we all must seize together, starting this Sun Day.

Yale Climate Connections: I think it would be fair to describe many of your previous books as environmental Lamentations or Jeremiads. But in this book, you seem to be in New Testament mode, spreading good news. What has happened with renewable energy that is so remarkable?

Bill McKibben: Well, I have to caution listeners at the beginning: I remain a bit of a Jeremiah. The climate crisis that I started writing about in the 1980s is coming to precisely the fruition that scientists said it would. And we’re seeing extremely dangerous things happening now with the most fundamental systems on the Earth. And we’re seeing all this, of course, at a moment in our own country when there’s a sense that democracy is winking out.

In the midst of those very big bad things, however, there is one big good thing happening on this planet. And that is the sudden surge in the use of what, for the last 40 years, we’ve called alternative energy, but which has now become the most obvious, straightforward way to make power.

Ninety-five percent of new generation here and around the world last year came from clean energy. And the acceleration continues. In May, the latest month for which we have numbers, China was installing three gigawatts of solar power per day. That means they were putting up the solar equivalent of a coal-fired power plant every eight hours. Those numbers are so different from anything we’ve seen before that it seemed worth writing this book to spread that story. [Continue reading…]