Solar Energy Is Liberation From Climate Change — and Oligarchs

P
eople are starting to realize where the energy future lies — as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week, “The sun is rising on a clean energy age.” Sun, wind, and batteries made up 95 percent of new electric generation last year around the world. In May, China was putting up a gigawatt of solar power — the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant — every eight hours. No energy source has ever grown at anything like this pace. 

When we talk about solar at all, it’s usually as a way — really, the only scalable way — to slow down the climate crisis. And indeed, that’s its clearest impact: California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is using 40 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did two years ago, simply because it’s built out so many solar farms and battery arrays. That’s a big enough number to change how hot the Earth eventually gets, if we can spread it far and wide. 

But saving what we can of the planet’s climate system is not the only reason we should be pushing hard to speed up this transition. Because — in all kinds of interesting ways — power from the sun is, well, liberating. 

That’s not a word we use much any more — it seems rooted in some hippie past. And in this hot summer, when we find ourselves ruled by a pack of feral grifters and pious frauds who have at their disposal a vast new secret police force of neck-gaitered, armor-clad mercenaries staking out hospital waiting rooms and elementary school playgrounds in order to capture the most vulnerable people in our midst — most of us would settle for just a little relief, a small refuge from the storm, a return to the status quo of a year ago. How to even imagine liberation when most power in our society has passed to a crew of self-pleasuring billionaires who conjure up computer intelligences that issue Nazi diatribes and dream of voyaging to distant planets so they can escape the one they have done so much to pollute? Liberation? We hang on now, studying the images of our collective trauma on the series of screens that mediate our lives. I have seen the best minds of my generation scrolling Instagram in a failed effort to finally fall asleep. 

And yet. We’re on the edge of the most far-reaching technological and economic transition in 250 years — since we learned to burn the coal and gas and oil that’s killing us now. Energy from the sun (and from the wind, which is just another form of solar power) is now cheaper than any other power; we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And technological and economic change on this scale invariably means social, cultural, and personal change too. So let’s think for a moment about what’s possible. Energy from the sun won’t solve every crisis we face — by itself, it won’t solve any of them. But it’s the one light flashing green, not red, the one wild card poking out of a rigged deck and begging to be played. Here comes the sun, and in the hippie-ish words of George Harrison: It’s alright. 

We’ll be playing that song a lot on Sun Day, September 21, the fall equinox — a nationwide celebration of power from the sun and wind, designed to start countering the power of Big Oil, and to drive home the notion that this is no longer “alternative energy,” but instead the common-sense, obvious, straightforward way to power the future. I don’t know whether we can actually stand up to the Trump administration and its insane energy policy (one that, among other things, delivers the technological future to our supposed adversary China). But I know we should try, and that that effort begins with explaining to people what a lucky moment we could be living in. 

Let’s start with this. Sunlight is everywhere — it falls on the earth in almost unimaginable quantities, bathing us in a steady supply of energy that far exceeds anything we could ever conspire to actually use. Our local star already provides us with warmth and light and photosynthesis, and now it would like to give us all the power we need, and then do the same tomorrow, ad infinitum. This power is omnipresent, and diffuse. Again, everywhere.

This is the opposite of the world we’re used to and consider normal. In this world, the coal and gas and oil we depend on are available only in scattered, concentrated deposits. Their economic value rests on the fact that they can be stored — indeed, hoarded. We talk about “reserves” of fossil fuel, and the value of an oil company is essentially the value of the combined reserves under its ownership. As the CEO of ExxonMobil said last year, his company would never invest in renewable energy because it doesn’t offer “above-average returns for our investors.” And he’s right — sunshine can’t be corralled, held hostage, ransomed out. 

So, at the outset: Solar power isn’t just different because it doesn’t produce carbon. It’s different because it doesn’t necessarily produce control. It can, of course — China has lots of solar panels and lots of repression. But all things equal, it tends to diminish the power of the wealthy, mostly because it can be done at small and medium scale — across Europe and Scandinavia, there are thousands of churches, community groups, and labor unions that own and profit from solar and wind installations. Even in this country, when the Texas legislature this spring tried — at the bidding of the fossil fuel industry — to shut down a surging boom in renewables, representatives from rural communities appeared in Austin to say: This is what funds our schools, this is what keeps our taxes under control in our remote county. And they won!

The starkest way to say this is: Even humans will have a hard time figuring out how to fight a war over sunshine. 

Imagine how American geopolitics would have been different over the last decades if petroleum held little value. (I remember a protest sign from the early days of the Iraq War: “How did our oil end up under their sand?”). Our military is deployed in a great arc designed to shield and protect the Persian Gulf; the terrorism that’s plagued us has too often sprung up in response to those deployments, and to the coups and schemes that have gone with them. Imagine being done with all that — imagine if Baghdad or Tehran or Kuwait held no more interest for the Pentagon than New Zealand. And it’s not just American sins: Imagine a world where Vladimir Putin actually had to build a Russian economy, not just pump Russian crude. Imagine a world where the king of Saudi Arabia was just one more tyrant, not someone we had to pay fealty to. That would be Liberation Day indeed. 

I’m not old enough to have known Woody Guthrie, but I’ve been to his museum in Tulsa and seen his guitar, with the phrase “This Machine Kills Fascists” written above the soundhole. I did know (and love) Guthrie’s great compatriot Pete Seeger, and I’ve watched him play a banjo emblazoned with the slogan, “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender.”

This machine — the solar cell — is less charismatic, but far more powerful. 

In geologic terms, it is brand new, not invented until 1954 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. (Which means its development was funded by millions of Americans dropping dimes into payphones.) And it is best understood, I think, as a way of directly converting sunshine into energy. For all of human history (and prehistory — archaeologists date the first fire rings in caves back about a million years) we’ve relied on intermediate steps. The sun grew trees, and we burned them. Or the sun grew trees and ferns and plankton and dinosaurs, and they died and got compressed and turned into coal and gas and oil, and then we dug them up and burned them. Burning was our great innovation — Darwin said language and fire distinguished our species. But burning always had some drawbacks. 

For one, it produced things we didn’t want. Smoke, for instance — one imagines that back in that first cave, people were already figuring out how not to sit on the side where the smoke blew. Now we know that more than 8 million human deaths a year come from breathing the cruddy byproducts of fossil fuel combustion. There are 5 million kids in Delhi; half have irreversible lung damage. And for what? That’s why it’s such good news that India is closing on 2 million electric three-wheelers — e-rickshaws — replacing the two-stroke gas engines that turn the country’s air blue. 

But also, more fundamentally, combustion produces heat — most of it waste heat. An electric motor, by contrast, produces work. An internal combustion engine can never be very efficient, producing far more heat than motion; an electric vehicle is, by contrast, physical elegance defined. Ditto a heat pump compared to a furnace, or an induction cooktop compared to the open campfire most of us still use in our kitchens. 

Think of it all as a series of small liberations from complication, at every step of the game. If you want to run a car on gasoline — which we’ve come to think of as the “normal” way — you need a society that can drill holes in the bottom of the sea or use explosives to “frack” gas seams miles beneath the ground. Once you’ve pumped this soup of old biology up to the surface, you need to transport it to a refinery — a massive chemistry set of pipes and valves and steaming exhausts — where you crack it into different components. You take the gasoline fraction and figure out how to get it to a gas station, either on a truck or a pipeline or a ship. There you wait for customers to come in so they can pump a measure into their tanks, where it is then sprayed in tiny increments past a spark plug to run a complicated series of pistons and cylinders that produce motion, as hot exhaust gases spew out a tailpipe. (Make sure you don’t do that with the garage door closed, or you’ll die.) 

At my house, sunlight falls on a panel on the roof, and the photons knock electrons loose from small pieces of silicon in the panel, producing electricity. It runs through a cord into my garage and then into the battery of my Kia Nyro, providing the power to turn the wheels — there are about 20 moving parts. You need to replace the tires and the windshield wipers, but there’s not much else to break. You go to the gas station for Diet Dr. Pepper — once you have an EV, it’s basically just a caffeine depot. 

The cost of these cars just keeps plummeting. Americans don’t know that, because of tariffs, but in China, you can buy a good one for $10,000 and a great one for $30,000 — a car that will do tricks you can’t even imagine. (OK, they can turn 180 degrees around in a parking spot.) High-end Chinese cars come with drone launchers. And once you have them, the cost of running them — filling them with juice, repairing them — is a fraction of what you’re paying now. Why do you think Big Oil was so keen to gut Joe Biden’s EV mandates? Once this gets rolling, the whole gas thing is just a noisy, smoking drag. 

But the level of simplicity goes many layers deeper. It’s not that the energy transition will completely dematerialize the world, but it sure heads us in that direction. You need to mine far less stuff because — well, because you don’t set lithium on fire. You put it in a battery where it does its job for a decade or two and can then be recovered by a recycler to make the next battery. You do set coal on fire, which means you need to go mine some more tomorrow. Wrap your head around this: 40 percent of all the ship traffic on the earth is just carrying coal and gas and oil back and forth to be burned, a job the sun is perfectly happy to do for free. If you send a ship full of solar panels across the ocean, they will in their lifetimes produce 500 times as much energy as a ship full of coal. It’s not a free lunch, but it’s definitely a value meal. 

If you have any doubts about how much this will liberate consumers, consider only how zealously Big Oil is fighting it. You think that they might have noticed California burning 40 percent less gas? They know that solar works — that it’s uncomplicated, straightforward, simple. Cheap. You pay some money up front to get some panels, and then you’re good to go. 

And if you think this is helpful for relatively affluent American consumers, consider what it means for poor countries around the world. Eighty percent of people live in countries that have to import fossil fuels; India, the most populous nation on earth, spent $100 billion importing oil last year. That was five percent of its GDP. And all the time it was being bathed in sunlight — remember, this technology works even better nearer the equator. They’re figuring it out: India announced this month that it had put up enough solar panels that it reached its 2030 target — half the nation’s electric capacity in renewables — five years early. Imagine — year after year, decade after decade — how much more money that is for schools or clinics or anything that isn’t tanker loads full of oil. 

I want to talk about one more liberation, though — this one, frankly, a bit hippie-dippy. I suspect that, over time, a rising reliance on the sun for our power might free us to be a bit more… ourselves again. 

We currently pay surprisingly little attention to the sun, given the fact that it’s the most charismatic object in the universe, and that as far as we can tell our ancestors were obsessed with it. (There is not a ‘primitive’ culture you can find without a good story about why the sun moves across the sky.) I think that lack of attention is a sadness, and one that in an oblique way gets at our current alienation, our incredible abstraction from the real world. Nietzsche (not exactly a noted liberationist), in one of the defining passages of modern literature, declared that God was dead. But it’s worth reading that passage to see the language he uses. A madman is running through the market, shouting ‘I seek God,’ and the people are laughing at him. “The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried. ‘I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun?” 

Nietzsche was not writing about fossil fuel — but he was writing about a century into the fossil-fuel era, when James Watt’s steam engines had begun to fundamentally disconnect us from the old world that ran on sun and wind. That disconnection has only deepened and grown more dangerous — what, after all, is the climate crisis but a warped and degraded relationship between our species and the sun, whose rays we are currently trapping in our blanket of greenhouse gases? 

As is often the case, the way to deal with a screwed-up relationship is not to break it off — it’s to deepen it. We didn’t actually turn off our connection to the sun, of course; like all the other animals, we’re still tied to it in ways we barely comprehend. Seasonal Affective Disorder is very real; 40 percent of Americans feel their mood slip as the sun wanes. (One hundred percent of humans feel joy when the sun breaks through the clouds.) It was Carl Jung, 40 years after Nietzsche, who sat with a Pueblo elder and asked him what he thought of the sun. “The sun is God,” the man said. “Everyone can see that.” A few months later Jung, was in the mountains above Nairobi, watching for dawn with the locals who waited each day for “the birth of the sun in the morning.” As one man told him, “the moment when the sun appears is God.”

You don’t need to actually worship the sun, of course (I’m a Methodist). But we should regard it with affection — it was St. Francis, after all, who wrote a canticle to Brother Sun; the last pope, who took Francis’ name, also borrowed from that poem for the title of his Laudato Si’ encyclical on climate change. If anything is primordial, it’s the sun that hovers above us all.

Among the moderns, it was van Gogh who truly channeled our star — he’d gone to France from Holland in 1888 to seek a “stronger sun,” and he found it from the house at Arles where he painted first the surrounding sunflowers, and then in the two canvases of seed sowers at sunset, he managed somehow to depict the sun as it never had been captured before — low in the sky, a source not of power so much as of joy. As the German critic William Uhde, a Jew forced to hide in France during World War II, put it: “His story is not that of an eye, a palette, a brush, but the tale of a lonely heart which beats within the walls of a dark prison, desiring and suffering without knowing why. Until one day it saw the sun, and in the sun recognized the secret of life. It flew towards it and was consumed in its rays.” No wonder, I think, that no modern artist is more beloved.

And as with painting, so with music. You can make a very long list of popular songs about the sun — Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers, yes, of course, John Denver and his shoulders. Obviously the Beach Boys. Sheryl Crow, Katrina and The Waves. Fats Waller may have written “On the Sunny Side of the Street”; Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and a thousand others sang it. Heck, Sun Records produced Elvis and Johnny Cash. Natasha Bedingfield, Weezer, Lorde. But in my lifetime the most popular musicians of all were the Beatles — their catalog runs impossibly deep; every person reading these words could recognize 50 of their songs from the opening bars. But with all the paeans that Lennon and McCartney deserve, the band’s most popular song (by far) is the George Harrison composition that opens side two of Abbey Road. “Here Comes the Sun” has been streamed 1.6 billion times on Spotify, twice as many as “Hey Jude” or “Let it Be” or “Yesterday.” I think it’s because we live at a hard moment and because it points the way toward something better. 

I started thinking this way last year, in early April, when a solar eclipse crossed most of the country. From the Mexican border in Texas, to the Canadian border in Maine (and indeed on the far side of both borders, since eclipses cross them with ease!), the sun went out for a brief minute, and everyone watched with wonder and delight. Cars poured into northern Vermont, because it had a nice long stretch of totality; definitely our biggest traffic jam of the year, maybe ever. But everyone was in a good mood — I watched it from the main quad at Middlebury College, and for a number of minutes, 1,000 college students put down their phones. Across Lake Champlain, in New York’s vast upstate complex of prisons, inmates sued for the right to watch the sun dim — they claimed it was critical to their practice of Christianity, Islam, or Santeria. It was actually an atheist who filed the successful lawsuit, however. “Moments when people of vastly different faiths converge in a single shared joy are exceedingly rare,” he wrote in his filing. “The price of missing any is unknowable, but substantial by any measure.” Indeed.

We live, it bears repeating, in a harsh moment on our world, where power and inequality and hate and aggression seem almost terminally out of control, embodied by our own president, Donald Trump, who has reserved some of his fiercest hate for the sun and the wind. 

It doesn’t need to be that way. For the first time since the moon shot of the 1960s, we have a group project that could truly capture our imagination — a project to end combustion and replace it with the power of the sun, a project that this time could extend beyond our national borders to involve all humanity. And this time it’s not about sending two people to a different heavenly body — it’s about bringing our local star close to earth, where it could save some of the beauty of the world we were born into, at the last moment before the climate crisis closes in. 

The one thing that unites us all is the sun that shines down upon us every day, that has fired our imaginations as long as we’ve had imaginations. If there’s a way to free us from the many traps we’ve wandered into as a society, or at least to loosen the jaws a little — it’s the sun. 

Bill McKibben is the founder of Sun Day and the author of Here Comes the Sun, which will be published next month.