Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben, W. W. Norton, 224 pages, $29.99.
Bill McKibben is the first to admit he might be feeling uncharacteristically positive these days.
“If I have a literary reputation,” the bestselling author admits, “it’s for a kind of dark realism.”
His groundbreaking debut, the unsubtly titled The End of Nature, made him the dean of American environmentalist letters and activism four decades ago. More recently, he scored a hit with a book grimly subtitled, Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? And earlier this year, he watched, from the safety of his longtime house in Vermont’s Green Mountains, the Eaton Fire that ravaged the foothill neighborhoods of Los Angeles County consume his childhood home.
“And yet,” he writes in Here Comes the Sun, his twenty-first book, “right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward.”
That path follows the sun, McKibben’s cure-all for our climate crisis woes. With the exponential expansion of photovoltaic cells, those silicon and glass sheets that convert sunlight to electricity, the cost of producing solar energy has recently undercut the market price of fossil fuels — to say nothing of the numerous deleterious costs of burning oil and gas.
What we still call “alternative energy” — that includes wind and geothermal — is now not only mainstream, McKibben writes, but the “Costco of energy: inexpensive and available in bulk.”
We’ve been here before, of course. Two decades after New Jersey’s Bell Labs first publicly demonstrated the photovoltaic effect, Jimmy Carter unveiled his solar panel project on the White House roof back in 1979, proudly but perhaps realistically proclaiming, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
One of Carter’s panels now resides as a literal museum piece in the headquarters of Huang Ming, CEO of Himin Solar and one of several modern-day Sun Kings of China. McKibben visits Himin to grasp the enormity of the solar marketplace that exists there, while dropping mind-boggling numbers that, as I type these words, have already been outshined.
China manufactures the vast majority of the 70 billion solar cells annually produced worldwide. Across Europe, but especially in Germany and Spain, Chinese-made, DIY-installed, mini solar panels perch from urban balconies. The batteries powering China’s latest EV models — unavailable in the U.S. — come with a 600,000-mile warranty, four to six times more than comparable American brands.
But China, which McKibben calls the “Saudi Arabia of sun” and the world’s first “electro-state,” also practices what it produces. Half of all clean energy today is installed in-country, including the world’s largest offshore solar farm, a field of over 2,300 “solar platforms,” each twice the size of a football field, capable of powering 2.67 million homes.
Solar power installation and manufacturing in the U.S. lags far behind. With the Trump administration’s dismantling of established and proposed green energy infrastructure, as well its ongoing tariff wars, we won’t be playing catch up anytime soon. But the now optimistic McKibben sees many bright spots.
In 2024, California reported using a quarter less natural gas to generate electricity than the year before. In the first months of this year, that number has risen to 43 percent — good news that McKibben calls the “single most hopeful statistic” he’s seen in his environmental career.
He especially singles out Massachusetts — he moved to Lexington at the age of 10 and has been writing about the town since he was a teenager — for praise. The Commonwealth trails only perpetually sunny Hawaii for the most solar panels per capita. In June of 2024, a section of Framingham became the nation’s first neighborhood to be heated and cooled by geothermal energy. And this past November, Governor Maura Healey signed into law a landmark bill that expedites the processing and permitting of renewable energies.
Perhaps surprisingly, red states earn McKibben’s biggest kudos. This year, Texas, which he calls the “spiritual heartland of fossil fuel,” is due to install twice as much clean energy as California and Arizona combined. Unfortunately, Lone Star Staters consume double the amount of energy as Californians, while the largest solar panel factory in the Western Hemisphere can be found in Dalton, Georgia, the congressional district of Marjorie Taylor Greene (making it even harder to overlook her ludicrous claim, voiced at a 2022 political rally, that solar panel-powered homes must turn their lights off at sundown).
McKibben’s litany of upward-swinging statistics, cribbed from a variety of journalistic and scientific sources, are certainly compelling, but I found myself wanting more of the on-the-ground reporting that built his career.
Yet, it’s impossible to ignore his urgent appeal. It’s far too late to “stop global warming,” he maintains. “At what feels like a very dark moment,” our best hope is to “take a giant leap into the light.”
Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, “Brown Pelican.” He lives in Cambridge.
This post is a partnership with Viva la Book Review.