~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Here Comes the Sun is long-time environmentalist Bill McKibben’s latest book on what’s happening to our planet weatherwise.
This man is up to date with global warming and the folks who don’t believe it and those who do; the idea that we can save the world from frying is what this book is about. It is a relief to read for its convincing positiveness.
The title itself is a hurrah for getting through our heads that the sun is our natural energy, our good friend, not an enemy, like fossil fuels burned for energy. In the front matter of Here Comes the Sun is an epigraph by famous songster Geroge Harrison that cheers the uplifting title: “And I say, it’s all right.”
The sun remains steadfast as tiny Earth constantly turns; our sun has its rays on us day after day, sunshine and gloom, season after season, millennium after millennium. Anyone who does not recognize its importance to our existence is surely a recluse existing behind drawn curtains resigned to hopelessness.
In June of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate that the sun would warm us more as years went by because of the emissions from fossil fuels fouling our air.
McKibben was obviously paying attention. The following year, he wrote his first book on climate crises, The End of Nature.
As 1988 was the hottest year in the States since temperatures were first recorded in the 19th century by instruments rather than hearsay, Hansen’s warning was validated: the following years beat records — 1990, 1998, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2023, 2024 and 2026 forecasted as ranking in the top five warmest years since 1850.
The idea that our climate was changing because of wealthy men’s love affair with fossil fuel had been written about since the 1970s but basically ignored. The hot summer of ’88 prompted people who couldn’t afford the fuel bill to have air conditioning in their homes to ask what in heaven’s name was going on.
It was around then that arguing about the heavenly facts and opinions led by scientists versus oil mavens began; it has not let up. Despite President Obama signing us onto the Paris Agreement in 2015, Trump got us out of it in 2016, President Biden reinstated us in 2020, and Trump in 2025 on his next first day of office once again pulled us out.
The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change with promises from members to work on reducing carbon emissions by 2030. [Climate Change, United Nations]
It was signed by 195 countries to “reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate-neutral world by mid-century.” [Paris Agreement]
Both times Trump removed us from the agreement, his excuse was that the Paris Agreement was “unfair.” Sound familiar? Like most fourth graders?
China got more breaks from the Agreement than we did while “hampering our growth”; [this is according to Trump, not to fact].
What’s happened since then, as McKibben explains, is that China has come to understand good reasons – health of persons and air, financial abundance, chance to be world leader like we used to be – for making the transition from fossil to sun and wind. China manufactures almost a monopoly of solar panels that it sells to African countries, to India and uses itself. So much for hampering our growth had we remained part of the Agreement.
Trump is stingy toward solar, and he insists on dissing wind power as “the most expensive form of energy there is. You cannot get more expensive.” [If you haven’t noticed, Trump likes to use verbal exclamation points by saying again what he’s just said. It’s a form of hyperbole (overshooting to excess, an extravagant statement not to be taken literally). [from Abused, Confused, & Misused Words]
The interesting thing about sustainable fuels like wind and sun is that their operation becomes cheaper and cheaper because the technology to use them as energy improves constantly. The “product” being used is ALWAYS there without having to mine it, log it out and haul it to a sawmill, drill deeper and deeper. Harvesting fossil fuel “products” gets more expensive with time. Harvesting sun and wind? They’re just here, hanging around and blowing through.
The argument regarding cloudy days and calm days hindering sustainable energy is moot – photovoltaic batteries store natural energy, and these batteries last for 10 to 15 years (car batteries 3 to 5).
McKibben quotes from a 2014 article in The Economist: “Solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions.” By 2024, a mere 10 year later, in a special issue devoted to solar energy, the magazine had changed its tune: “An energy source that gets cheaper the more you use it marks a turning point in industrial history . . . the steepest drop in the price of one of the basic factors of production that the world has ever seen.”
With oil, natural gas and coal and then shipping it via miles of gas lines, 100-car coal trains and tens of thousands of tank trucks, refining it, loading the gas tanks at gas stations, the cost of getting energy to us increases by the year and is much higher than renewables ever can be. Gas prices have risen drastically since the cheapness of the early years.
I remember a time in the early 1950s when a gas war in Jefferson, IA, brought gas down to 10 cents a gallon. There may have been other gas wars in the nearly 80 years since, but we are paying $4 to $6 a gallon this month
Sustainable, available energy has become cheaper and will continue to do so. We’ve been paying over and over for fossil fuels. According to McKibben, once we’ve “built the equipment—the solar panel and the wind turbine — the sun and wind deliver the energy for free.”
Once we’ve added the battery storage, the price of which has plummeted along the same line as panels and turbines, the cost is always going to be cheaper because we won’t have to be buying fossil fuels again and again, by the week to run our cars and by the month to heat our homes. A coal museum in Kentucky has installed solar panels to save $10,000 a year in heating and lighting their building.
McKibben wrote, “Oxford scientists released a report showing that the rapid transition to renewable energy would, net, save the WORLD 26 trillion dollars in energy cots in the coming decades because you don’t have to pay for fuel.”
The Vatican committed to the Paris Agreement to become the first state on earth to run entirely on solar power. So, what are we waiting for? This is McKibben’s question, and his answers continue throughout, readable and understandable. He convinced this reader the sooner the better, as he finished . . . .
“I end this book . . . saddened by all that happened in the last 40 years, and by all that we haven’t done . . . convinced that we’ve been given one last chance. Not to stop global warming (too late for that) but perhaps to stop it short of the place where it makes civilization impossible.”
