Bill McKibben on Renewable Energy, "Sun Day" & the "Last Chance" for Climate

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We turn now to the climate crisis. A new report by the clean energy tech research group Ember finds China's "creating the conditions for a decline in fossil fuel use," as it leads the production of solar panels and wind turbines. Meanwhile, another new report confirms the Trump administration is openly hostile to renewable energy and has overseen, quote, "the most abrupt shift in energy and climate policy in recent memory," unquote, which has led to a jump in greenhouse gas emissions in the first seven months of the Trump presidency. Trump's so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" not only ended subsidies for renewable power sources but applies a new tax on solar and wind projects. On Friday, the Department of Energy wrote on social media, quote, "Wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it's dark outside and the wind is not blowing," they said. Trump criticized renewable energy efforts during a recent Cabinet meeting. [00:01:07] Speaker 2: REP. The President: We don't allow windmills. We're not allowing any windmills to go up. I mean, unless there's a legal situation where somebody committed to it a long time ago, we don't allow windmills. And we don't want the solar panels that I was speaking with the secretary about, because they take up, you know, thousands of acres of our farmland. You see these big, ugly patches of black plastic that comes from China. [00:01:32] Speaker 1: AMY GOODMAN: Despite all this, The Los Angeles Times reports today renewable energy reached nearly 25 percent of U.S. power generation in June, up from 18 percent last year. We spend the rest of the hour with Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, founder of the group Third Act. His new book is titled "Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization." You actually, Bill McKibben, despite Trump going back on renewable energy, people fear it going back decades, hold out great hope. You see this as an opportunity we've never had before. [00:02:14] Speaker 3: AMY GOODMAN: Amy, Juan, you guys have been at this for a long time. This is as dark a moment as there's ever been in our democracy, and our planet is overheating fast. In the midst of that, there is this one big good thing simultaneously happening, and it's so big and so good that it might help with both the climate and the authoritarianism crisis. And that's this rise in the last 36 months, a pretty untold story of just extraordinary amounts of clean energy surging into the world's energy system. It is centered in China, and the numbers are staggering. The May is the last month we have data for. In May, the Chinese were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day, a gigawatt being the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant. They were putting up one of those made out of solar panels every eight hours. California, which has done more than any place in this country, reached some kind of tipping point in the last 18 months. Most days now, California supplies more than 100% of its electricity from renewable energy for long stretches. At night, the biggest source of supply on its grid is batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. Bottom line, California, fourth largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago. That's the kind of number, that may be the most optimistic number that I've heard in the 40 years I've been working on the climate crisis. It's the kind of number that begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the world eventually gets. And remember, every tenth of a degree means 100 million people moving from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one. So it's not that we're going to stop global warming. It's too late for that. It's that we have really a chance to reboot the way the world and its economy and its geopolitics works right now. [00:04:28] Speaker 4: And Bill, I wanted to ask you about this staggering investment that China has been putting into renewable energies. It accounts now for almost a third of all the clean energy investment in the world. It's producing 80% of all the solar panels, 60% of the wind turbines. And so all of this investment has actually driven the price of green energy down. So that now, according to the EMBER report, 90% of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produce power more cheaply than fossil fuel alternatives. So doesn't this mean that the global South now will gobble up, the poorer nations of the world will gobble up clean energy alternatives to fossil fuel? [00:05:18] Speaker 3: Absolutely, Juan. It's really important to understand that, as of about four years ago, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And China has been leading that effort. We know about petrostates. China's the world's first electrostate. And now, as you say, that's leaking out from across its borders. Pakistan, right next door. Last year, Pakistanis just basically using TikTok videos as their guide, installed enough solar panels to equal half the country's national electric grid. Pakistani farmers, who are early adopters of this because diesel to run their tube wells for irrigation is their biggest cost input, they bought millions of these solar panels. They lack the money to build the metal stanchions to point them at the sun. So instead, they're just laying them on the ground. Nonetheless, Pakistan was using 35% less diesel last year than the year before. Now this is leaking into Africa, not just the solar panels, but the things that make use of the clean energy that they provide. We're used to thinking of Detroit as the center of the world's auto industry. That is not true. It's now two or three cities in China whose names I find difficult to pronounce. They're producing the best and cheapest cars on the planet and they are flooding the markets of the developing world. Forget about Ford. It's BYD that's going to be the car company of the future. [00:06:56] Speaker 4: But yet here we are in the United States going in the complete opposite direction from what China and the rest of the world are striving for. How do we deal with that situation here in this country? [00:07:09] Speaker 3: So it's what's so fascinating. And it's pretty easy, I think, to explain the success of renewable energy, which is good news for almost everyone on the planet, except the people who own oil wells and coal mines. And for them, it's an existential threat. So what did they do? You'll recall candidate Trump last year telling the oil industry that for a billion dollars – it was kind of an Austin Powers moment – for a billion dollars, they could have anything they wanted. They ended up raising about half a billion between donations, advertising, lobbying in the last election cycle. And clearly that was enough because they've – the Trump administration has done everything that big oil could have hoped and more, really. I mean, I don't think anyone anticipated that they would actually shut down work on 80% complete wind farms off the coast of New England like they did last week. That's just insane. I mean, if they keep with it, a thousand years from now, archaeologists will be trying to explain how this aqueous Stonehenge emerged off the coast of Rhode Island. We're – if we keep at this, our role in the world a decade from now will be as the kind of colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion, a place where the rest of the planet, if they can get tourist visas, come to gawk at how people did things in the olden days. And that's especially aggravating, or should be for Americans, because this technology was invented here. I mean, the solar cell was invented 20 miles away in Edison, New Jersey. The first industrial wind turbine was 30 miles south of my house in Vermont in the 1940s. And yet we're just handing it all to China in order to appease the oil industry. [00:08:59] Speaker 1: You talk about California. You're headed, what, to D.C., to speak of politics and prose, then the Petro Metro. That's Houston. You're headed to Texas. Yeah. Texas might surprise people when it comes to solar and wind energy. [00:09:14] Speaker 3: Texas is now putting up clean energy faster than California, faster than any place in this country. Big oil doesn't like that. And they tried in the state legislative session this year to pass a number of laws, the most prominent of which people called DEI for natural gas. It was going to force anybody who wanted to put up five megawatts of solar to also put up five megawatts of natural gas. People emerged from the hinterlands across rural Texas to say, don't do this. This is how we pay property taxes in our county. This is what keeps the schools open. And so the legislature backed off, returned to their project of redistricting Texas to help Mr. Trump instead. It's not clear that even in this country they can beat down the economics of renewable energy, though obviously they're going to do much damage, which is precisely why we're rallying across the country on September 21st for this thing we're calling Sunday. [00:10:15] Speaker 1: You're wearing a t-shirt that says Sunday. [00:10:17] Speaker 3: Indeed I am, because there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of events planned for that day. We obviously can't change policy in Washington in the short term. But we can change policy in states and localities across the country to make it much, much easier to do solar power. Amy, it costs three times as much to put up solar panels in the U.S. as it does on your house in Australia or the EU. A tiny bit of that's from tariffs on solar panels. Mostly it's because we have 15,000 municipalities, each with their own building code and team of inspectors. It can take months to get done what takes days every place else. This can be changed with ease by local officials. California, Maryland, and New Jersey have already adopted this thing called the solar app that allows a contractor to get instant permitting just by putting a few details into a computer program. We need that across the country, especially in light of federal intransigence. [00:11:21] Speaker 1: Sunday is September 21st, the fall equinox. [00:11:24] Speaker 3: The fall equinox, exactly right. [00:11:28] Speaker 4: And Bill, I wanted to ask you, last month the Environmental Protection Agency formally proposed revoking the Obama-era scientific determination that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare because they cause global warming. Your response to that and what people can do? [00:11:47] Speaker 3: I mean, it's nonsense, of course. The EPA and the Trump administration can't repeal the laws of physics, which are the problem here. That's what's driving climate change. But I think there's something deeper going on as we move into this possibility of a world that runs on clean energy. And I was really thinking about it as we were listening to Jeremy report from Middle East. I mean, think about you guys have run the War and Peace Report for a long time. Think about what this show and this world would have been like for the last few decades if oil was of trivial value on this planet. How many wars and coups and assassination attempts would have been averted? Humans are, you know, altogether too good at starting wars. But figuring out how to start one over sunshine will be a trick. I think that this is not just a possibility for dealing with climate change. I think the fact that we have access now to energy that's available to everyone, everywhere, instead of being something concentrated in a few spots, controlled by a few autocrats and plutocrats, that's a huge, huge potential gift. [00:13:01] Speaker 1: It's a real challenge to capitalism because, I mean, this is decentralized as you can get unless the big oil companies, when they see their days are numbered, just switch over to try to control the access to the sun. [00:13:14] Speaker 3: Even if they switch over, which I don't think they will, I'm afraid, all they can do, and it's very important and you can make a lot of money doing it, is build the solar panels. But once you've built the solar panels, the sun delivers the energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. There's no way to hoard it or hold it in reserve. The same charismatic object in our galaxy that brings us light and warmth and via photosynthesis our food is now willing to provide us with all the power we could ever want. That's the kind of moment that changes civilization. As thoroughly as learning to harness the combustion of fossil fuel changed civilization, that's what we call the Industrial Revolution. [00:14:01] Speaker 1: In New York, Zoran Mamdani has just shocked the Democratic establishment, still the Democratic leader in Congress from New York, Hakeem Jeffries, astonishingly has not endorsed the Democratic primary candidate. But how do you see Zoran Mamdani's race for mayor of New York as a model for the rest of the country? [00:14:24] Speaker 3: I mean, the fact that he's creative and full of good humor is a shocking thing in our political life. But it's a real reminder of how much there is that we could do. Across Europe, in cities full of apartment dwellers like New York, millions of people have put up what we call balcony solar over the last three years. They just go to the Best Buy, come home with a solar panel designed to hang over the railing of their apartment balcony, plug it into the wall with a standard plug and producing 20 percent of the power they use. That's illegal everywhere in the country, except in the state of Utah, where the state legislature, that progressive bastion, enabled it by a unanimous vote earlier this year. I'm betting that within weeks of Mr. Mamdani becoming Mayor Mamdani, we're going to see balcony solar installations sprouting across the five boroughs and what a nice sign that'll be. [00:15:23] Speaker 1: And you gave this, you started Sunday with another renegade mayor, and that is Michelle Wu of Boston, who Trump is trying to take on. [00:15:32] Speaker 3: Michelle Wu, Zoran Mondami, people like this offer a real potential future, and they have an enormous ally in this new technology that really gives us a fresh kind of hope. [00:15:48] Speaker 1: AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, founder of the organization Third Act. His new book is just out, "Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization." He is on book tour. Tonight, he'll be in D.C. at Politics and Prose, tomorrow in Houston. And he's organizing a national mobilization for September 21st, the fall equinox, called Sunday 2025, celebrating solar and wind power. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We'll see you next time.