This Sunday is Sun Day!
You can learn more here.
Bill McKibben is leading the… no pun intended… charge. Please spend a few minutes pondering these points he made in a recent episode of the Volts podcast.
You know, we have called this stuff alternative energy for 40 years. And that has its effect. You know, that’s the corner of our brain in which it ends up. But it’s not alternative energy. Ninety-five percent of new generated capacity around the world and in this country last year was clean, renewable energy. The shorthand I’ve been using is, you know, we’re kind of used to thinking about it as the Whole Foods of energy.
It’s nice, but pricey. Actually, it’s the Costco of energy. It’s cheap, it’s available in bulk, it’s on the shelf ready to go if we choose to use it. And as I say, the fossil fuel industry and Energy Secretary Wright and everybody else are just as cognizant of that as I am. They’re just fighting desperately to try and keep people from making this liberating realization.
the sun gives us warmth, it gives us light, it gives us photosynthesis, and it’s now willing to give us all the power we could ever need. That’s so mind-blowing and so liberating and so beautiful that hopefully we can figure out how to use that to start and kind of shift some of the tired axes of our political debate.
If the current powers that be really wanted to Make America Great Again, they’d get on board the Sunshine Express. But their minds are tiny… and their pockets are weighed down with money from the fossil fuel industry. China, meanwhile, is zooming past – in an EV.
If you look at things like car sales data from around the world, now the entire global south, their vehicle fleet’s going to come from China and they’re going to be electric and they’re not going to be using U.S. oil or anybody else’s, and on and on and on across a wide range. If we have any serious pretension to making America an important part of the world economy, then we’re going to do this. We’re going to have to do this. The alternative is to decide — and I think this is really sort of close to Trump’s heart — to decide that 15 years from now, America is going to be the global museum for internal combustion, where people from other countries who can wangle a tourist visa come to see what the world looked like back in the olden days, you know.
McKibben covers more about the divergent paths the U.S. and China are taking in his latest Substack post:
We only care about now—the president has an attention span of three minutes, and corporate executives can’t see past the next quarter. Whereas the Chinese are clearly thinking many decades into the future, which they plan to own.
He includes a quote from Bloomberg’s David Fickling that sums up the race we’re losing.
right now, Beijing is offering cheap, clean power, employment, trade and a route to prosperity. Washington is offering tariffs, policy chaos, White nationalist memes and South Korean workers in shackles after a raid on an EV battery factory. This is no way to win the grand strategic contest of the 21st century.
Sunshine isn’t just free. It’s a path to energy freedom.
We’ve been locked in an energy system since the Industrial Revolution that was all about centralization. Energy came from a few big facilities and was piped down the line to us, and we took it, and that was that. And it was controlled by people who controlled those relatively rare and scarce deposits of fossil fuel around the world. But that’s not necessary anymore. In 1954, people invented this solar cell in Bell Labs in New Jersey. And it turns out that it’s able to directly translate the power of the sun, those billions of hydrogen-into-helium reactions every second, and make that useful power for all of us.
It liberates us from dependence on those oil companies and all the other parts of that structure, because all of a sudden we can produce on our own homes or locally in our own states, the stuff that we need. It liberates us from the incredible threats that we’re now facing and that darken our world all the time, the threat of climate change above all. And it sends us up into a kind of — well, a kind of sunny upland, you know, “Energy from heaven, not from hell.”
And no one owns the sun, which makes it more egalitarian.
Look, we live on a planet haunted by climate change, and we live on a planet made grotesque by the inequality that we see around us. The biggest structural change that we could make, easily and immediately, that would do at least something about both those crises, is to switch from fossil fuel to energy from the sun. That’s the one big good thing happening on planet Earth.
Yes, there are environmental costs to solar panels and batteries. But it’s way kinder to the Earth.
A boatload of solar panels will provide, over its lifetime, about 500 times as much energy as a boatload of coal. If you let that sink into your consciousness, then you begin to understand the possibilities of the world ahead.
There are Sun Day events all over the country, where you can find out more about renewable energy, and practical, better-for-the-earth-and-your-wallet energy options. The Cincinnati one is at Cincinnati Public Radio’s new HQ.
Open your eyes. Look forward, and look up. That big ball of energy up in the sky can save us money, and save our planet.
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