For generations, the material successes of our industrial age – medical cures, easy travel, global conversations and the like – suppressed undercurrents of doubt about how long we might keep this up. Faced with this, young Bill McKibben named his first book The End of Nature.
McKibben’s 1989 climate change polemic came just after physicist James Hansen warned the US Congress to “stop waffling” about signs of a warming Earth. It became an enduring classic of its kind, in the mould of Rachel Carson’s 1962 pesticides exposé, Silent Spring.
In that moment at least, politicians listened. In 1992, heads of state agreed at the Rio “Earth Summit” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But trouble lay ahead. The burning of coal, oil and gas created giant global corporations, which in 1997 in Kyoto conspired with political interests to spread the blame and cloud the issue. Ever since, that unholy alliance has bedevilled every effort to turn things around.
A 1989 reviewer called McKibben’s book “a matter of life and death”. If that was so then it seems even more so today, 37 years later, given science’s increasingly dire signals. But McKibben in his seventies is sounding a more sanguine note.
In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun (acknowledging Beatle George Harrison), McKibben says that having caused our climate woes technology can also solve them – if we allow it to.
All Earth’s energy, bar a minuscule 0.03 per cent from internal heat, comes from the sun. For a billion years or so it was sequestered as coal, oil and gas, which we plundered – because we could. Now we’ve finally worked out other means of harnessing solar energy, indirectly via wind and hydro and directly via photovoltaic cells.
And we’re doing this cheaply and at an unprecedented rate. As the International Energy Agency reported a fortnight ago, the world is entering an “age of electricity”, and last year turns out to be a banner year in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Unlike past times of lower fossil fuel use resulting from economic recession, the global economy in 2025 grew at a normal rate, yet coal, the world’s main source of electricity for more than 100 years, was edged out by renewables for the first time. New installations of carbon-free energy exceeded overall demand, meaning that renewables are now displacing fossil fuel sources.
The growth rate of carbon emissions reached record levels last year, but the main driver was developed economies, mainly in North America. In India, China and smaller developing countries like Indonesia, emissions growth is slowing with rapid take-up of solar power and electric vehicles.
The fossil fuel lobby along with advocates for nuclear – let’s call them centralists – would like us to see solar and wind power as intermittent, temporary, peripheral to the main game which will always be those familiar energy hubs, big power stations. But that’s a fallacy.
Dave Borlace, the friendly bloke from the UK I mentioned last week, has drawn attention to a fine piece of work by another Briton, Michael Liebreich, explaining why fossil heavyweights have been able to skew the public argument to make the energy transition seem much slower than it really is.
Only about a third of the energy from coal burnt in a power station becomes electricity; the rest is waste heat. The “primary energy” referred to by centralists includes all that wasted thermal energy.
There’s no such waste in solar and wind. As Liebreich points out, with no thermal loss the power generated is all delivered as electrons. So while fossil fuels may continue to serve heavy industry, aviation and shipping, physics dictates that everywhere else, including land transport, direct electrification using increasingly-efficient battery storage will always win out.
In mid-2023, notes McKibben, the world installed for the first time a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels – the equivalent of a new nuclear or coal plant – every day. At the same time in 2024, the hottest year yet measured, “we were putting up a gigawatt of solar panels every 18 hours”.
Despite political headwinds and fierce resistance from fossil fuels, wind and solar installation is “scaling faster than any technology before them”. The achievement of those 18 hours had taken a week in 2016, and a whole year in 2004. The revolution continues, and it’s happening everywhere, on every continent.
In this context today’s dominant paradigms don’t seem to matter. Says McKibben, it’s possible that historians will note these few years for the Trump renaissance, or the birth of AI. “But if we’re lucky, they’ll be recalled as the moment we took a decisive turn toward the sun.”