The sun will save us

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Episode Title: The sun will save us

Release Date: September 22, 2025
Guest: Bill McKibben, Climate Activist and Author of "Here Comes the Sun"

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Sean Illing speaks with legendary environmentalist and author Bill McKibben about the rapidly evolving landscape of clean energy, the inescapable realities of climate change, and where hope might actually be found today. While the climate news can feel unrelentingly grim—particularly with renewed policy hostility under Trump's second term—McKibben frames this as a moment of both crisis and genuine, world-changing possibility. They explore how technological and economic shifts in solar and wind are altering global power structures, the ongoing resistance from fossil fuel interests, and why activism at the local and state level remains critical.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State of the Climate Crisis

• No longer about "stopping" warming:
  • "Stopping global warming is no longer on the menu. What may still be on the menu is stopping global warming short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees.” (Bill McKibben, 03:32)
  • Every tenth of a degree matters, shifting hundreds of millions outside climate comfort zones.
• New scientific data signals mounting risks—jet stream disruptions, Gulf Stream slowdowns, and growing frequency of extreme events.
• The task now: keeping climate change within survivable limits.

2. Clean Energy Progress: A Tipping Point

• The cost and scalability of solar and wind, especially in California and Texas, have changed the game:
  • California hit a "tipping point," now often running over 100% of daytime demand from renewables, using batteries at night.
  • "California, fourth largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity this summer than they were two years ago." (Bill McKibben, 05:08)
• Texas, despite its fossil-fuel roots, is now installing renewables even faster than California, with local communities defending these projects for their economic benefits.
• Globally, China is investing vast sums—installing the equivalent of multiple coal plants in solar/wind each day, “lapping” the US.

3. Political and Policy Headwinds: The Trump Factor

• Trump's administration is described as devastating for the climate—rolling back regulations, boosting drilling, and attempting to gut climate science findings.
• "What Trump et al are really doing... is ceding the energy future to China." (Bill McKibben, 06:52)
• However, local and state resistance is finding success, notably against attempts to ban renewables in Texas.
• Bureaucratic obstacles in the US (e.g., overcomplicated permitting compared to other countries) are non-trivial but addressable.

4. The Fossil Fuel Industry: Last Stand and Money in Politics

• Fossil fuel companies understand the existential threat posed by cheap renewables—hence, record lobbying and political spending.
• “They’re desperate and they need to slow down this transition any way that they can to preserve their business model.” (Bill McKibben, 22:51)
• Renewable energy breaks up the centralized, scarcity-driven economics of fossil fuels and therefore threatens entrenched power.
• Energy abundance via sun/wind could undermine authoritarian regimes and the geopolitics of oil scarcity.

5. Changing the Politics of Climate Activism

• The climate movement must shift from only “blocking bad things” to actively building out new infrastructure.
• The decentralized, homegrown nature of solar (“Your roof is your roof”) offers appeal across the political spectrum, including conservatives and libertarians.
• “There is no reason that solar can’t be made politically appealing to conservatives and libertarians. I mean, shit, who actually wants to be hostage to big oil and big utility?” (Sean Illing, 28:49)
• Fossil fuel lobby turned what was once bipartisan into a polarized issue; breaking this framing is key to progress.

6. Economic and Equity Paradoxes

• Solar and wind are “almost too cheap for capitalism” and don’t fit neatly into traditional investment/profit models built on scarcity.
• “It doesn’t return profits at the same volume as an energy source that you can hoard. But...if you have cheap energy in your country, ... everything that happens in your country becomes cheap to do.” (Bill McKibben, 34:21)
• Lower-cost energy, once realized at scale, would be a national economic boon but is threatening to established industries.

7. Realism and Hope: The Stakes and Possibilities

• Acknowledgement of outstanding questions: some momentum in planetary systems (polar melt, jet stream, etc.) may already be too great.
• “We do have for the first time a scalable response that we could try, and so we damn well better try it and hope that we didn’t wait too long.” (Bill McKibben, 38:45)
• Ultimate vision: this shift could curb not just emissions, but also the tendency toward authoritarian regimes and resource conflict.
• On hope:
  • “I have hope that it’s worth a try.” (Bill McKibben, 38:15)

8. Concerns about the Solar Economy

• Mining (lithium, cobalt) is a real human rights challenge, but McKibben argues it pales compared to the ongoing devastation from fossil fuels.
  • “There is no free lunch, but there are definitely more and less expensive lunches.” (Bill McKibben, 45:11)
• Once the materials for renewables are deployed, the need for further extraction is much lower than with fossil fuels, which must be continually burned.

9. What If We Fail?

• The devastation from unchecked warming would be catastrophic:
  • Billions of climate refugees; food disruptions; ecosystem collapse; sociopolitical destabilization.
  • “If it’s not hell, then it’s of a similar temperature. It’s smokier. It’s harder to grow food. Its biology is in shock and decline.” (Bill McKibben, 47:01)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the new stakes:
  • “Each tenth of a degree that we raise the temperature moves another hundred million people out of a climatically comfortable zone, that’s a very big deal.” (Bill McKibben, 03:45)
• On the economic revolution:
  • “We’ve crossed an invisible line where this is the cheapest way to make power... It’s twice as cheap to make power from the sun as from setting stuff on fire.” (Bill McKibben, 14:38)
• On why the fossil fuel industry is so scared:
  • “The problem with solar energy from their point of view is once you’ve paid the money to put a solar panel on your roof, the sun delivers the energy for free. From Exxon’s point of view, that’s the stupidest business model of all time, but for everybody else, it’s a great business model.” (Bill McKibben, 22:51)
• On the political opportunity:
  • “Solar panels make it actually true... This thing you’re hunkered down to defend with your AR15 actually is more or less an independent operation.” (Bill McKibben, 26:42)
• On the dangers of failure:
  • “3 degrees Celsius, we’ll see somewhere between 1 billion and 3 billion climate refugees… a quarter of the human population having no choice but to move.” (Bill McKibben, 47:01)
• On climate activism and persistence:
  • “I have hope that it’s worth a try... I can’t think of any better way to spend my life than trying to do something about this gravest problem we’ve ever wandered into as a species?” (Bill McKibben, 38:15–38:29)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------| | 00:32 | Episode intro, framing the climate crisis | | 03:04-06:26 | McKibben: Where we are now and why every tenth of a degree matters | | 06:26-09:15 | Trump’s impact, U.S. ceding clean energy leadership to China | | 12:40-14:38 | Permitting obstacles and local innovation (balcony solar in Utah, Germany)| | 14:38-17:27 | Why solar/wind scaled faster than predicted, China’s investment | | 22:51-25:55 | Fossil fuel industry’s last stand and economic self-interest | | 26:42-30:04 | Political marketing of solar: transcending left/right | | 33:53-36:00 | Solar is “too cheap for capitalism”; geopolitics of abundance | | 37:04-38:29 | Centralization, fascism, and the hopeful possibilities | | 45:11-46:37 | Mining for renewables: social and environmental costs | | 47:01-48:00 | The stakes if we fail: heat, displacement, collapse | | 48:26-49:15 | McKibben: Would his younger self be proud or sad? |

---

Tone, Language, and Takeaways

Illing and McKibben bring urgency, realism, and at times frustration—but also genuine optimism based in technological fact—to a conversation that avoids sugarcoating. Profanity is used for emphasis (“Fucking matter very much,” 05:08; “God damn it,” 28:49), underlining the emotional weight. Throughout, they return to the theme that while catastrophe is possible, the path out is finally becoming practical—and that embracing and accelerating change is not only necessary but increasingly aligned with economic self-interest and varied political identities.

---

Conclusion

This episode goes beyond doomscrolling, detailing how the energy revolution is underway, how political structures fight back, and where pressure points remain. McKibben argues that if we seize the opportunity, we'll not just save ourselves from the worst but potentially build a freer, fairer, and more resilient world. But it demands action—now, everywhere, and by everyone.

---

Transcript

[Podcast Host (Ad Narrator)]

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to [e-mail] podcast or wherever you listen to.

[Sean Illing]

Not all journalism is the same. Take the Guardian. Our coverage has something unique fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say, so we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch and listen to the Guardian for [e-mail] Talking about climate change absolutely sucks. What is there to say? The planet keeps heating up more and more, so many of the disasters we were warned about years ago are starting to pile on. Meanwhile, the oil keeps flowing, the politicians keep punting, and the system's meant to save us keep failing. And all that would be true even if Greta Thunberg were the President and not Donald Trump, whose administration seems intent on unraveling what little climate progress we've made. It seems bad, but what if for the first time in a long, long time, there's actually some hello, I'm Sean Elling and this is the Gray Area. My guest Today is Bill McKibben, one of the most influential voices on the climate in the last four decades. Bill sounded the alarm in his 1989 book The End of Nature, which many consider a foundational text of the modern environmentalist movement. He's also founded organizations like Third act and 350. Org, the latter of which remains one of the biggest climate activist groups in the world. His new book, Here Comes the Sun, is maybe the most hopeful thing he's ever written, because for the first time, we may actually have the tools we need to tackle this problem. So I invited Bill on the show to talk about that and the many possibilities in front of us. I also, to be perfectly honest, was looking for reasons to feel hopeful about this moment. Bill had more than a few Bill McKibben, welcome to the show.

[Bill McKibben]

Hey, what a pleasure to be with you, man.

[Sean Illing]

You have been in the trenches for a long time, Bill, on this fight. And I wanted to ask, just to set the table where you think we are right now in terms of plausible Goals, you're pretty clear, and you have been for a long time, that we are well past stopping global warming. So where's the bar for you? What are we reasonably aiming at?

[Bill McKibben]

Yeah, stopping global warming is no longer on the menu. What may still be on the menu is stopping global warming short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the knees. That's an open question. And there's scary stuff happening right now with climate science. The last couple of years have seen real new data on the biggest systems on planet Earth. The jet stream, the Gulf Stream, the atmospheric content, the moisture content of the atmosphere driving this cycle of drought and of flood. These things are terrifying. And, and they're enormous and they have big internal momentum. Best case scenario is that we're able to knock some tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And since each tenth of a degree that we raise the temperature moves another hundred million people out of IC climatically comfortable zone, that's a very big deal. It remains probably the biggest deal that we have. The biggest, most important task that humans have ever had is figuring out how to at least keep climate change within survivable limits.

[Sean Illing]

Well, that is an important point, right? Like, it's not a binary win lose thing. There are degrees here and they really.

[Bill McKibben]

Fucking matter very much. And that's why the news that's coming from the clean energy world is so important. You know, because I have covered this for so long, I have kind of my sense of how things are shifting. California put up enough solar panels and batteries over the last couple of years that they've reached some kind of tipping point. Most days, California is able to supply more than 100% of its power for long stretches of the day from clean energy. At night, when the sun goes down, batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon are now often the biggest source of supply. But the bottom line is that California, fourth largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity this summer than they were two years ago. That's the kind of number that spread around the world, begins to knock some tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets. And I gotta say, that's by far the best number that I've heard In the almost 40 years that I've been at work on this.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, and, you know, we're more than six months into Trump's second term, and it appears certainly to be a disaster for people who care about the climate. As you write in the book, Trump rode back into office, vowing to drill Baby drill and to basically torpedo the electric vehicle industry. Has he delivered on that promise? How much damage is he doing?

[Bill McKibben]

He's doing extraordinary damage with the spineless support of the entire Republican Congressional party, many of whom know better, and they're doing enormous damage. In fact, what Trump et al are really doing, and it should make any red blooded American's blood boil, is ceding the energy future to China. Even as we speak, the Chinese are now moving into the lead with technologies that were developed in America. We built the first solar cell, the first lithium ion battery. But it's not just that we're they're eating our lunch. We've sent a cadre of red capped waiters to serve them our lunch. We couldn't be delivering on a platter the future any more easily to China than we are. And that I guess will work out to be good news for the planet as a whole because they seem committed to the project of spreading these technologies everywhere. I think that Trump and the fossil fuel industry that supported him so fulsomely may have overestimated our ability to influence the globe. They may also have overestimated our ability to completely change things here in this country. You know, the most interesting place in America right now for energy is Texas, which is at the moment installing renewable energy faster even than California. In Texas in the spring, the fossil fuel industry tried to do the same thing they did in Washington, pass a series of legislation to all but outlaw renewable energy. But out of the woodwork in rural Texas came one person after another to say, don't do this. This is how our community pays for its schools now with a wind farm. The solar arrays are what keep our old folks home open here on and on and on. And the Texas legislature, unlike the US Congress, back down, didn't do it. So the story is not yet finished, even in America, and we're finally organizing some to kind of push back.

[Sean Illing]

My wife works in clean energy and a couple of weeks ago she was the first person to tell me about this report, which I'm sure you're familiar with. I think you wrote about it on your substack. There's a report by the DOE which was defending an announcement from Trump's EPA that revoked a long held scientific finding that greenhouse gases are bad. So it turns out there's nothing to see here. Great. But this is a big deal, right? Because it's the basis for the government's efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. And it's an even bigger deal than it might seem because the real goal here isn't just to shut down climate policies now. It's to prevent future administrations from working on the climate problem. I mean, for Christ's sakes, Bill, is this as bad as it looks? Are you hopeful that this will be challenged successfully in the courts?

[Bill McKibben]

Well, it will be challenged, it'll be challenged in court. We'll see what happens. But this is an up is down administration. Their declaration that we have nothing to worry about from climate change comes in the same year that are second largest city had huge neighborhoods burned to the ground. It comes weeks after the worst flooding in the hill country of Texas that we've ever seen. It comes amidst a summer when in the eastern U.S. we've been breathing wildfire smoke more days than not as it drifts down the border from the boreal forests of Canada. It comes during the hottest years we've ever recorded on this planet. So their ability to argue with physics isn't in the end going to prevail, but they can do a lot of damage in the meantime. Which is why we can't just rely on the superior economics of sun and wind and batteries to get where we need to go. We also need the kind of activism to change laws and change minds. Even with Washington under the control of inane people, there is an enormous amount that can be done at the state and local level to help America at least stay engaged in this revolution that's sweeping the rest of the world. And we're intent on doing that. Let me give you an example. Putting solar panels on your rooftop in America costs roughly three times as much than any other place on Earth. If you live in Australia, you can call up on a Monday to your contractor and say, I want solar panels on my roof. And by Friday they're up there producing power. And that's why 40% of Australians have solar panels on the roof. It turns out that the biggest reason for that difference is not that we have to pay more for solar panels, though with the ridiculous tariffs. That makes up for some of the difference. Much more important is the fact that we have this baroque and byzantine permitting structure here with 15,000 municipalities, each with their own set of rules about what exactly has to be done, their own set of inspectors, on and on and on.

[Sean Illing]

Can I ask, Bill, why is it so hard? Why are these people doing this? Why is it so hard to do what is so obviously the thing to do?

[Bill McKibben]

So part of it is the endless baleful efforts of the fossil fuel industry to prevent change, but part of it's just inertia. And happily that's Overcomeable. Let me give you another example. In the last two years, a technology called balcony solar has swept across the eu. Millions of German apartment dwellers go to Best Buy, plunk down a few hundred euros, come home with a solar panel designed to be draped off the balcony of their apartment and plugged into the wall of their home, where it instantly starts producing 20% of the energy they use. That's illegal everywhere in America except that progressive bastion, the state of Utah, which a couple of months ago, by unanimous vote of the state legislature, passed a law enabling it to happen there. Because one libertarian state senator said, why can the people of Hamburg and Frankfurt do this and the people of Provo and Salt Lake City are prevented? No one had a good answer. And so now, if you go on YouTube, you can find lots of videos of Utahns installing this technology and beaming broadly as their electric meter begins to spin the other way.

[Sean Illing]

It's kind of astonishing how quickly this has happened, how quickly solar in particular and wind is being scaled up. Why did so many people so badly underestimate how quickly solar and wind power would grow? I mean, you might expect governments and the banks and the investment firms to be conservative, but. But, hell, even Greenpeace underestimated how fast we'd get here.

[Bill McKibben]

For all of the last decades, we've lived in a world where fossil energy was cheap and renewable energy was expensive. And that became very ingrained in our way of thinking about this. I don't think people mentally quite adjusted to the reality that's now probably four or five years old, that we've crossed an invisible line where this is the cheapest way to make power. But that line is so important and so dramatic, and we're now so far below it, it's twice as cheap to make power from the sun as from setting stuff on fire.

[Sean Illing]

When did we actually cross that line? When did we cross that line?

[Bill McKibben]

2021-2020-2021-2022.

[Sean Illing]

And so that's fairly recently.

[Bill McKibben]

Oh, it's very recent. I mean, look, temperatures around the planet really begin their most recent upward spike. You'll recall a whole spate of headlines with climatologists saying these are the hottest temperatures in at least 125,000 years on this planet. And every month since June of 2023 has been the hottest. October, the second hottest, May, whatever. We've stayed up there. June 2023 was also the first month when humans were installing a gigawatt's worth of solar panels every day. A gigawatt's the rough equivalent of a coal fired power plant. That month was the month when this race began in earnest. And we're now at the point. I mean, in April, China alone was installing 3 gigawatts of solar power every day. They were putting up the equivalent of a coal fired power plant worth of solar panels every eight hours across China.

[Sean Illing]

Jesus.

[Bill McKibben]

It's really remarkable. The world is changing in front of our eyes.

[Sean Illing]

Well, this number was pretty startling to me. Apparently in 2022, and this is, I'm quoting from your book, China spent 26 times as much on the clean energy supply chain as Europe and the US combined. Now that number was expected to fall to 2.4 times as much because of Biden's inflation reduction Act. But obviously Trump's victory in 2024 will change that. How dramatically will it change it? Will we get anywhere close to that expected number or will China just continue to wildly lap us?

[Bill McKibben]

China is going to lap us. One possibility here is that 20 years from now, the US will be a kind of theme park for for those foreigners who can get a tourist visa to come look at the way that human beings used to live in the olden times when they had to set stuff on fire to make their world work. My guess is that post Trump we'll have no choice but to try and catch up as best we can, but we will no longer own this future in any way. We're seeding the future right now.

[Sean Illing]

Foreign support for the show comes from Shopify. When you're starting a new business, it can feel like you're expected to do it all. Marketing, design and everything in between, even if you've never done half of it before. What you really need is a tool that helps you reach your goals without having to master every skill yourself. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Their design studio lets you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style, letting you choose from hundreds of ready to use templates. You can also set up your content creation by using their helpful host of AI tools and you can even create email and social media campaigns with ease and meet your customers wherever they're scrolling or scrolling. See why Shopify is the commerce platform behind most millions of businesses around the world. If you're ready to sell, you can be ready. With Shopify, you can turn your big business idea into a reality. With Shopify on your side, you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today. @shopify.com Vox go to shopify.com Vox shopify.com Vox support for the show comes from Bombas. You know those songs that make you just want to run. Maybe you're in the middle of a workout and you're totally spent, but then that one track hits. Maybe it's tool, maybe it's a little Wu Tang and boom, you're back. That's kind of like what Bomba socks do. You put them on and you're ready to go. This summer you can get moving with Bomba socks specially designed to wick, sweat, keep you cool and prevent blisters. You probably know I've tried out Bombas for myself. They are my favorite socks in the winter and fall. I rock their wool socks because I wear boots a lot and they're super thick but still breathable now that it's 500 degrees down here on the Gulf Coast. My go to socks are their lightweight athletic socks. They are comfortable and they really do keep you cool and dry. You can head over to bombas.com and use code grab gray area for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M B A S.com code gray area at checkout. That's bombas.com code gray area at checkout. Support for the Gray area comes from Found for small business Owners. Bookkeeping and taxes don't just drain your wallet, they steal your time. Think of all the hours you've already spent buried in spreadsheets. Instead of building your business, hours you could have spent playing catch with little Tina or playing house with tiny Frank. If this hit a little too close to home, it's probably time to give Found a look. Found is business banking designed for small business owners just like you. Found lets you manage your financial tasks effortlessly, all in one easy to use app. They say the platform can help you manage your money, track your spending, invoice your clients, and even handle your taxes so you can focus on what matters most, your customers. You can open a Found account for [e-mail] f o u n d.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont bank member fdic. You don't have to put this one off. You can join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with found. The fossil fuel industry. I mean, look, they're, they know what's coming. They have for a long time. They're. They're fighting it. That's what they do. But I did hear you say recently that they're scared. Very scared. And we know this because they're spending way more money than they ever have on politics. Do you think it's different this time. Why is it different this time? Is it as simple as burning shit is no longer the cheapest form of energy and they know it. So this is kind of a last stand.

[Bill McKibben]

Yep, yep. They're desperate and they need to slow down this transition any way that they can to preserve their business model to as long as they can. Remember, they've prospered by controlling an energy source that essentially you can hoard, that you can have what we call reserves of. And they're now facing an energy source where that's not possible. The world is bathed in sunshine and wind every day and we have batteries to allow us to store it for a little while, enough to make sure that in essence, the sun doesn't go down. This is extraordinarily threatening to them. As the CEO of Exxon explained last year, his company was never going to invest in renewable energy because, and I quote, it doesn't offer above average returns to our investors. Which is true. I mean, the problem with solar energy from their point of view is once you've paid the money to put a solar panel on your roof, the sun delivers the energy for free. From Exxon's point of view, that's the stupidest business model of all time, you know, but for everybody else, it's great business model. And here's the other thing. It's not just that we have a clean and cheap way to produce energy now. It's that that clean and cheap way of producing energy begins to subvert some of the grotesque inequality that also marks our planet and that plagues it almost as deeply. The idea that we depend for something as important as energy on people who control the few places where it can be found, explains a lot about our world. That think about what the geopolitics of planet Earth would have looked like over the last 50 years if oil had been an inconsequential commodity. Humans are good at fighting wars about anything, but they're going to be hard pressed to figure out how to fight one over sunshine. So many, many, many economic, political, geopolitical facts start to shift here. It's no wonder that it's scary for the powers that be. And what we have to get across is how exciting and liberating it is for everybody else. And if we can do that, I mean, if we can do that, then maybe we can make this transition happen fast enough to matter. It's going to happen 40 years from now. We're going to run the planet on sun and wind. Economics eventually erodes politics, but if it takes us anything like 40 years. Then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet.

[Sean Illing]

Well, just stick with the politics of this. Obviously, you've been a leader in the climate movement for a long time, and the climate movement helped get us to this point. But as you know, the climate movement was born in a different technological and economic world. You know, for the longest time it was all about stopping bad shit from happening. Right? Making it harder for fossil fuel companies to do what they do. But now the tech has changed the game. It's changed the economics of energy. So how should the politics of the climate movement shift in light of these new. The movement isn't about blocking stuff anymore. Right. It's about building.

[Bill McKibben]

Right. So I think increasingly that's exactly right. I've written a series of pieces over the last years saying people like me, old white people, should stop suing to stop projects they don't like. I think it's absurd now to have people trying to block solar farms because they don't want to look at them or whatever. And I do think that the imperative is to try and make it easier to do things. I don't think we're going to do anything in Washington. As far as I can tell, rational thought has largely left the building both at the White House and in the Republican power centers in Congress. So I would just have to write off Washington for the moment and figure out how to do what we can at the state and local level. Happily, as I said, that's achievable, and it's achievable in red places as well as blue. This kind of technology is really attractive to people for many different reasons. One of those reasons is if you're the kind of person who really thinks my home is my castle, and most American homeowners at some part of their soul have that feeling a little bit, then solar panels make it actually true. You know, this thing that you're hunkered down to Defend with your AR15 actually is more or less an independent operation. There's a part of that in many Americans, and that's okay. And there's also plenty of people who just love the idea that the groovy power of the sun is going to network our lives together in great ways. And that's cool, too. And these things can coexist and work together. It's a small versus big political declension, not a left versus right one.

[Sean Illing]

That's something I. It's worth lingering on for a minute because it's. It's often overlooked or, or misunderstood that There is. There is no reason that solar can't be made politically appealing to conservatives and libertarians. I mean, shit, who actually wants to be hostage to big Oil and big Utility? You should have the right to self sufficiency. You should have the right to use the sun that falls on your home however you want. Is this a free country or not? God damn it.

[Bill McKibben]

Amen.

[Sean Illing]

That's a political layup, right?

[Bill McKibben]

Amen. No, it's absolutely right. Your roof is who's to prevent you? Why should you have a series of onerous permits before you can use the sunlight that's falling on your roof to generate the power for your house? I mean, that's ludicrous. And that's why I think that we really have some room here to make progress. It's why I think this is one of the important parts of the resistance to what's happening in our nation's capital.

[Sean Illing]

Why do you think this has been so neatly turned into a red blue issue when it very clearly doesn't have to be?

[Bill McKibben]

The way that it happened was that the fossil fuel industry spent a huge amount of money over decades, making it a partisan issue. Essentially purchased one of our political parties. The Koch brothers, our biggest oil and gas barons, were also the biggest bankrollers of the Republican Party for decades. And it became something that that Republican office holders had to kind of sign onto as part of their thing. That's a big difference. I mean, environmentalism 50 years ago was an essentially bipartisan operation. You know, it was Richard Nixon who gave us the Clean Air act, the Clean Water act, the epa, though he was pressed hard to do it by great activism at the first Earth Day. But this is, you know, this is what the fossil fuel industry chose to do. And we know now from great investigative reporting that they understood everything there was to know about climate. Back in the 1980s, back when I was writing my first book about all this, they chose to interpret it not as a threat to the planet, but as a threat to their business model, which they were willing to defend even at the cost of wrecking the planet. And now they're willing to defend it even at the cost of wrecking our democracy. So look, this is a tragic story in a lot of ways, but its ending hasn't quite been written yet. And the wild card here is the introduction of this cheap and beautiful form of energy. And when I say beautiful, I think that's an important part of the story. The sun already gives us light, it gives us warmth, it powers photosynthesis. Now it's willing to Provide us with all the power that we could ever want. That's an extraordinary gift. And it's a gift appreciated, among other things, by lots and lots and lots of people of faith. The Vatican just announced two weeks ago that Vatican City will become the first fully solar powered nation on Earth. They've broken ground on a big solar farm outside Rome. And given the fact that breaking ground is usually only a few months away from powering up big solar arrays, by year's end, Pope Leo will be a completely solar powered pontiff. So the battle's not over. Big Oil is big, powerful. They hold sway in America right now. But just to give you an example, one of the things that they've had the President do, as he's doing these tariff negotiations, is lean on countries to import a lot of American liquefied natural gas for their electricity supply. Country after country, to avoid tariffs, has said, we'll take 50 billion or 100 billion or whatever worth of this stuff. But, you know, I think that most of those countries are looking at that and saying, you know, do I really want my future energy supply under the thumb of a country as fickle and erratic as the United States? I don't think so. I think that most of what's happening is backfiring.

[Sean Illing]

There is. I mean, there's a kind of a perverse economic problem you point to in the book. And it relates to what you were just saying a second ago about the fossil fuel companies. Solar and wind are almost too cheap for capitalism. They just don't fit neatly into a system that's built on scarcity and profit. I mean, how much of a problem is this in terms of just winning the political battle?

[Bill McKibben]

It's a problem in terms of winning the investment battle because it doesn't return profits at the same volume as an energy source that you can hoard. But I think what countries are figuring out is that's the kind of problem you want to have. Because if you have cheap energy in your country, and this is what the Chinese are pioneering now, it means that everything that happens in your country becomes cheap to do. I mean, if you can run your whole nation and your manufacturing capacity and stuff off 2 or 3 cent a kilowatt, our power, think about your comparative advantage over a country like the United States. And I think Trump's sense is that he has a super strong hand here, but I think, as has been shown in other arenas, his hand is nowhere near as strong as he thinks it is that there is a wild card here that allows the rest of the, the world and escape from our particular vision of the planet.

[Sean Illing]

Well, the problem is money and power. I mean, as you point out somewhere in the book, right?

[Bill McKibben]

Always.

[Sean Illing]

The reserves of oil and gas right now are currently worth tens of trillions of dollars. They are not. They are not going to lay down in this fight. They're just on.

[Bill McKibben]

No. So we better not lay down either. I started a group three years ago called Third act that organizes old people like me for action on climate and democracy. We've got about 100,000 of us now around the country, and we're good at this stuff. And we're going to keep the pressure on for local and state change in permitting regulations, keep the pressure on public utility commissions in every state to speed the hookup of renewable resources to the grid, on and on and on. There's no use crying about Trump. At some level, we can't do anything about him for a couple of years. And so we do all the other things that we can, even as we work to make sure that never again do we end up under the thumb of someone as malign and ignorant as our current ruler.

[Sean Illing]

Well, you say it in the book, so I'm comfortable saying it here. Breaking the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a really big deal if you don't want to live in a world of increasingly fascist politics. I mean, maybe that's the real political breakthrough that solar makes possible. Not just emission cuts, but the weakening of authoritarian energy regimes and the kinds of ugly nativist politics that scarcity tends to create.

[Bill McKibben]

I think that it's a liberating moment, potentially, for human beings. Look, we absolutely have to do this or the planet will burn up. So that's good incentive to move along, but we get a lot of other benefits if we do do it.

[Sean Illing]

You really believe there's hope, then? I mean, obviously we know the technology is there, the economics makes sense, but there's the political problem. There's a problem of power. That's always the problem. You really have hope that we can overcome that?

[Bill McKibben]

I have hope that it's worth a try.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, no shit.

[Bill McKibben]

And I can't think of any better way to spend my life than trying to do something about this gravest problem we've ever wandered into as a species?

[Sean Illing]

Well, you say on the first page that you still see a path forward. We've talked about it. Can I ask at what point will that path be foreclosed? How much warming is too much to come back from?

[Bill McKibben]

The true answer there is, we don't know. We've never really carried out this experiment before on this planet, at least with humans around to watch. So we don't know. It's possible that we've waited too long already. The momentum that's built up in things like polar melt that have effects on systems as large as the jet stream and the Gulf Stream are very scary. I am not a Pollyanna about any of this, but we do have for the first time a scalable response that we could try, and so we damn well better try it and hope that we didn't wait too long. Hope that the Hollywood ending works at least a little bit here.

[Sean Illing]

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app download Today. Support for the gray area comes from Quints. As the cooler temperatures start rolling in, those high 90s giving way to mid-80s, that 79% humidity dipping all the way to 74% just as the founders intended. Quince, I'm happy to report, is ready to help you upgrade that wardrobe with affordable fall fashion that's perfect for whatever it is you do with your time. They've got trucker jackets for when you're trucking and chore jackets for when you're choring. Also puffer jackets and bomber jackets. Personally, I need a new leather flight jacket, which they also have and I gotta say I wouldn't be offended if Quince sent me one. Our colleague Claire White got to check out Quint's and here's what she thought. I personally can't wait for the weather to cool down so that I can start to wear my Quince cashmere again. I've got so many of their classic cashmere sweaters in a ton of different colors. They are a staple in my wardrobe. You can keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from Quint. You can go to quince.com gray area for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E.com gray area free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com gray area.

[Ad Voiceover]

In business they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time. That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage storage and 80% less for networking. Better. In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com Vox that's oracle.com Vox.

[Sean Illing]

There is something that I really wanted to ask you in particular as an activist and an organizer. I mean, you, you write about this in the book. You're aware of the debates on the left about the climate and the best political strategy, and sometimes I don't. I genuinely don't know what I think about it. There are more pragmatic, centrist types, I guess we'll call them on the left who say it's better politics for us to not foreground the climate. Right? To not make a bunch of noises about how this is an existential threat. Not because that isn't true, but because it scares normie voters, many of whom just do not prioritize this the way we wish they did. What are your thoughts on that debate?

[Bill McKibben]

I'm no genius political analyst. I'm not particularly persuaded about all of that. 2020, when the polling data showed that climate was one of, if not the biggest voting issue for Democratic voters In the primaries, 2020 came out okay. 2024, when we didn't talk about climate, didn't come out okay. I don't think that was the reason necessarily, but I don't read the tea leaves as closely, but I think in this case we get to talk about something else. Clean energy that polling shows is remarkably popular and across ideologies. So why not? Let's do it? Climate we're going to talk about anyway because we're going to keep having fires and floods and droughts, and that's what's going to and continues to cause people to understand that we have a problem.

[Sean Illing]

Well, there's another line of resistance that you get on the left, and there are good reasons for it, frankly, and that is the concerns about the lithium and cobalt mining. That's involved with the solar economy and the human cost of that.

[Bill McKibben]

Yep, those are true and important and we should be working hard to ameliorate the effects as best we can, but we also have to hold them in contrast to what we do now. So there is no free lunch, but there are definitely more and less expensive lunches. You got to go mine some lithium. But once you mine the lithium, you put it in a battery where it does its job for the next 25 years and then you can recycle it for the next battery. If you go mine some coal, what do you do with it? You set it on fire and have to go mine some more the next day. That gives you some sense of the world that we live in on the other side. And in that world on the other side, 9 million people a year, almost all of them poor, don't die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. So I think that on human, on grounds of human rights and the human future, we're pretty safe in saying that the renewable world looks a lot nicer than the one we inhabit now. That doesn't mean we shouldn't work hard and that people aren't working hard to try and make sure that we don't repeat with lithium mining all the same injustices that we've allowed for centuries with the mining equipment.

[Sean Illing]

I don't ask this question because I. I want to stew on the bleakness or potential bleakness ahead. But I do think it's important to be honest about the world we might inhabit in the future if we don't get this right. Bill, what kind of planet are we looking at in 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years?

[Bill McKibben]

If it's not. If it's not hell, then it's of a similar temperature. It's smokier. It's harder to grow food. Its biology is in shock and decline. Extinction is rampant. 3 degrees Celsius. We'll see somewhere between 1 billion and 3 billion climate refugees around the world. That is a quarter of the human population having no choice choice but to move. If you reflect on the fact that a couple of million refugees at our southern border were enough to utterly discombobulate our politics and push us pretty darn close to something like fascism, then try multiplying that by 1000 and figure out what kind of world we're living in. That's why doing everything that we can to limit the rise in temperature is the most important political task humans have ever had.

[Sean Illing]

Just one last question. I am actually curious. If you think back to when you started doing this work and imagine where we are now. Would 25 or 35 year old Bill McKibben be happy or sad? Would he think look at all this progress or would he think look how bad things look how bad we've allowed things to get.

[Bill McKibben]

25 year old or 27 year old. I guess that's how old I was when I wrote the End of Nature. Would be sad that our political system didn't work more effectively because we were given fair warning by the world scientists of what was coming. But I think that I'd also still be up for the fight. This is just our job, whatever our age is. So I'm glad even in my dotich to be able to put my oar in and do what I can. And many, many thanks for talking about it with me.

[Sean Illing]

Bill McKibben, always a pleasure and once again the book is called Here Comes the Sun.

[Bill McKibben]

Take care.

[Sean Illing]

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You know, my own pessimism has become a bit of an inside joke on the show and for good reasons. It is something I really struggle with. And well, that's because there's a lot of bad news in the world and it's especially hard on the topic of climate, which is why essentially said at the beginning that it just sucks to talk about it because it sucks to think about it. But Bill actually made me feel better about our possibilities and about some of the solutions at hand right now. So I'm thankful for the book, I'm thankful for the conversation, and I hope you are as well. But as always, we do want to know what you think. So please drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749 and once you're done with that, please go ahead. Rate Review subscribe to the podcast that helps us spread the show to new people. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

[Podcast Host (Ad Narrator)]

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics of behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to [e-mail] podcast or wherever you listen.

[Sean Illing]

And Doug Limu and I always tell.

[Bill McKibben]

You to customize your car insurance and.

[Sean Illing]

Save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it.

[Bill McKibben]

Cue the emu music.

[Sean Illing]

Limu Save yourself money today.

[Bill McKibben]

Increase your wealth.

[Sean Illing]

Customize and save. We say that may have been too much feeling.

[Ad Voiceover]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[Bill McKibben]

Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Very unwritten by.

[Ad Voiceover]

Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.