REVIEW
“The world will run on sun and wind 40 years from now”
Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun , spells out many reasons to be hopeful about climate action By Nicholas K. Smith, Editor, OPEC Fund Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization Bill McKibben, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2025, 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1-324-10623-4
I f you’re looking for doom and gloom on what awaits our warming planet, there is no shortage of books out there to satisfy a masochistic desire to look the inconvenient truth square in the face. Thankfully, not every book about climate change, rising emissions or the energy transition takes such a fatalistic approach. Environmentalist and frequent New Yorker contributor Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization , fits nicely into that second category. McKibben peppers the book with enough facts and figures to make even a hardened climate pessimist brighten up: in 2024, 92.5 percent of all new global electricity brought online came from renewables; in the USA that figure was even higher at 96 percent. Tracking the unique acceleration of solar tech, he says
that it took from 1954, the year the solar cell was invented, to 2022, to install the first terawatt of solar power. But it didn’t take another 68 years to deploy the second terawatt – it took just two. “For the first time,” McKibben writes, “we’re putting up a gigawatt’s worth (which is to say a coal or nuclear power plant’s worth) of solar panels every day.” In other words, it’s easy to come away from the book with the sense that we might actually be on the cusp of turning things around. But not to get overly optimistic, McKibben presents some harder facts to bring that optimism a little closer to the ground: “We’ve already done fundamental damage to the planet’s physical systems, to the point of altering the jet stream and weakening the Gulf Stream; we’ve already raced past the 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperature that we pledged in Paris to avoid.”
Elsewhere, he says the world will run on sun and wind 40 years from now, but is less optimistic that the current pace of deployment will be fast enough to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. McKibben has been writing about climate for quite a while now. His first book, The End of Nature , published in 1989, gave the general public an early glimpse at global warming. 2019’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? examined the species-level risk people are taking by fuelling climate change. Additionally, he writes the climate-focussed Substack “The Crucial Years.” Alongside the rapid pace of deployment, McKibben also documents the rapid drop in prices, one of the key reasons solar power is having a moment right now. In 2014, The Economist held that “solar power is by far the most
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