Bill McKibben has a new book coming out on the 19th of August, 2025, called Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

It tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind―and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay. From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid, in a year, to the world’s sixth-largest economy―California―nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds.

I have pulled together a number of the most inspiring quotes from Bill’s book, that were recently published in The New Yorker. 

“People are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.”

“Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables.”

“In May, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. In the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China have decreased with emissions linked to producing electricity falling nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal.“

“In South America, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none.“

“Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent.”

“Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up.”

“The sun, pours out daily more than a quadrillion kilowatt hours of energy, greater than the energy contained in all the reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium in the earth’s crust.”

“Burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity is at best slightly more than thirty per cent efficient—or seventy per cent inefficient. For that reason, it takes two to three times more energy to run a standard car than to run an E.V. E-biking may prove to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a five-hundred-watt e-bike costs about eight cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so it costs about a penny to travel five miles.”

“In Pakistan, as 2024 began, demand for electricity on the national grid started falling—not because the economy was in decline but because so many Pakistanis were putting up solar panels. As one Lahore-area corn farmer, Mohammad Murtaza, said, “I have never seen such a big change in farming. Ninety-five percent of farmland has switched to solar in this area.” If you have travelled through rural Asia, you know the sound of diesel generators pumping the millions of deep tube wells. Now solar electricity is pumping the water—diesel sales in Pakistan fell thirty per cent in 2024. If you’re a farmer, that’s kind of a miracle; fuel, one of your biggest costs, is simply gone. As Waqas Moosa, a Pakistani solar entrepreneur told journalist David Roberts, in February, “a three-kilowatt inverter with, you know, maybe four or five panels is now routinely included in a bride’s dowry.”“

“How did Pakistanis learn to put up all those panels?
Training programs, tips, and tricks hotlines and such sprang up, as people around the country started sharing notes, so that tens of thousands of electricians and others could get into the game. TikTok videos set to Punjabi music, showing electricians unboxing inverters and comparing Chinese panel brands.
The Pakistan example is particularly significant because the sale of Chinese solar panels is cannibalizing demand from the very coal plants China financed in that nation just a few years ago, as part of its New Silk Road, making it a litmus test for China’s global climate leadership. By treating Pakistan as a proving ground for managing stranded fossil assets while scaling renewable ecosystems, China has the opportunity to develop and validate transition models that could be exported across the Global South.”

“The current predictions for Solar are that by 2026, solar will generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear plants combined. By 2029, it will generate more than all the hydro dams. By 2031, it will have outstripped gas and, by 2032, coal. According to the I.E.A., solar is likely to become the world’s primary source of all energy, not just electricity, by 2035.”

“According to a 2023 report from the Energy Transitions Commission, all the materials needed to reach net zero by 2050 will be less than the amount of coal consumed in a year. Lithium, once mined, does its job for decades; coal just gets burned, which means you have to mine more. And, when batteries or solar panels degrade, the minerals in them remain valuable enough that they will almost certainly be recycled—large-scale recycling operations are appearing around the world. A report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we will have done all the mining we’ll need to do for battery minerals; after that, we’ll just recycle them, over and over again.”

“A one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of corn-based ethanol.” In April, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences noted that all the corn grown for ethanol in the U.S. takes up about thirty million acres, an area roughly the size of New York State. If forty-six per cent of that land were converted to producing solar energy, they found, it would generate enough electricity for the U.S. to decarbonize its system by 2050.”

“It’s possible that renewables will see yet another acceleration, driven not just by climate worries but by security fears, as nations seek some insulation from geopolitical, macro, and financial risks. A 2023 poll by the market research firm Glocalities, of twenty-one thousand respondents in twenty-one countries, found that sixty-eight per cent favored solar energy, five times more than public support for fossil fuels. And surveys conducted by the communications and research firm Global Strategy Group in the fall of 2024 found that eighty-seven per cent of Americans—and almost eighty per cent of people planning to vote for Trump—favored the clean-energy tax credits in the I.R.A. “Solar power remains the most popular source of electricity in America,” Global Strategy Group partner Andrew Baumann said, “with broad support across the political spectrum. If we can make the transition affordable and easy, the will is there.“

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization is available to buy or reserve in your local Library on the 19th August. Just don’t buy it on Amazon! 

You can read the full article from Bill in The New Yorker

Photos via The Atlantic :