Movement veterans Bill McKibben and Jamie Henn have been thinking about where climate activism goes from here. They argue for a new focus on celebrating and accelerating the miraculous global boom in solar power. We get into what it looks like to fight for building stuff, how to win the online information war for clean energy, and why the sun offers not just cheaper power, but a form of liberation.
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David Roberts
Hello, everyone. This is Volts for August 20, 2025, "What does clean energy activism look like?" I'm your host, David Roberts. We live in difficult and confusing times, to say the least. Perhaps no group is as confused or faces as many difficulties as climate activists. The clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which the climate movement had only ambivalently embraced, are now mostly gone. The wind and solar parts in particular have disappeared, and renewable energy is under direct, ongoing fire from the Trump administration. The situation is dire. Where does climate activism go from here?
Bill McKibben, the man more responsible than any other single human being for the birth and development of the US climate movement, has some ideas. He thinks people need to get excited about the sun, specifically the miraculous profusion of solar power across the globe, which is outpacing even the most ludicrously optimistic forecasts.
What would activism in service of the sun look like? And is the climate movement capable of evolving? To help think through these problems, McKibben is teaming up again with his old partner in crime, Jamie Henn, with whom he founded the climate organization 350.org — they are pushing a new project called Sun Day, which we are going to get into.
I will not endeavor to cover their full resumes, which are long and distinguished. I will just say that McKibben’s latest book is Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, which is pretty self-explanatory, and he’s running the Third Act network, designed to mobilize activism among the 55-and-older crowd. Henn is running Fossil Free Media, the nonprofit communications lab he founded.
I am excited to have both of them with me today to discuss what it might look like to rally activists in favor of building stuff. All right then, with no further ado, Bill McKibben, Jamie Henn, welcome to Volts.
Thank you so much for coming.
Jamie Henn
It's great to be here.
Bill McKibben
Good to be with you, old friend.
David Roberts
I was looking back, I can't believe neither of you, I think, have ever been on the pod, which is bizarre to me since we go way back. So it's great to talk to you. I have a million things I want to get into. But Bill, I wanted to start with a question for you. Kind of a big, heavy question. So like from the time I got engaged with climate change, basically — you know, I think back to like the early 2000s — it was basically like you and Al Gore and the theory of the case was always some version of "Fossil fuel incumbents are powerful and have politics kind of locked up, politicians kind of locked up. The only counterbalance to that, the only force capable of overcoming that is people." So the prescription for the climate movement is to build something analogous to the civil rights movement, a volunteer-based, bottom-up people's movement that would get out on the streets and force change. That has always been the theory of the case, sort of in the background. Twenty years have passed. You have had, I think, miraculous ability to turn people out, turn tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people out.
People got out on the street, but it just didn't — I mean, tell me if you think I'm wrong — but it just seems like the cultural atmosphere, the media atmosphere, something, it just didn't catch on. Like the people, it turns out, like it only matters if the people who decide what matters decide that it matters. And they didn't want it to matter, so it ended up not mattering. And I don't know how to get above or around that. But basically, this is a long-winded way of trying to ask you, is that still your basic theory of the case, that that is what we need?
Bill McKibben
Yes, and it has mattered tremendously in the past. I mean, the reason that we have a Paris climate agreement that got lots and lots and lots of countries around the world working on climate change was because we had a big, broad-based global movement. And Jamie and I and our colleagues like May Boeve, who helped start that at 350.org, have great pride, I think, in that work, work which continues to this day, to stand up to the fossil fuel industry. But the prospect for standing up to the fossil fuel industry is different now than it was 20 years ago — and for a simple reason.
All the time since I wrote "The End of Nature" back in the 1980s, up to about three or four years ago, the essential problem here was that fossil fuel was cheap and clean energy was expensive. And that made it structurally extremely difficult to make progress. Because fossil fuel was pretty much synonymous with the economy. That's now flipped. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And in some ways, that really does change everything, or at least it could.
It's an epochal moment for human civilization that allows us to think very directly about ending the human habit of setting things on fire. If you think I'm cognizant of that, well, the fossil fuel industry is at least as cognizant of it. They're probably well aware that, say, California, the fourth largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas this summer to generate electricity than they did two years ago because they've put up so many solar panels and so many batteries. And that explains the fight back that we're now seeing across our society. And it's why we have to continue engaging in this fight.
The other reason we have to continue engaging and mobilizing is because there's this deep time element here, David. As you know, if we weren't operating under the specter of rapid, rapid, rapid climate change, then the fact that it might take 20 or 30 years for us to change over to wind and sun would be annoying and expensive and so on, but it wouldn't be quite the crisis that it is. The problem is that if it takes us 20 or 30 years to really make this transition, then the planet that we run on sun and wind is going to be a broken planet. And that's what news from the jet stream and the Gulf Stream and the moisture content of the atmosphere and on and on and on is now telling us in the starkest possible ways.
David Roberts
One way you could put it is, and I talk about this with students a lot when I talk about sort of the history of my involvement with this, as you say, the first 10 years of engaging with climate is, you know, solutions were mostly theoretical, mostly far out. You know, required a heavy dose of altruism to get over the top. So you're pushing a boulder uphill, basically. And now, if I'm reading you right, basically your idea is the boulder has crested the hill and is rolling downhill, and we just need to make it roll faster.
Bill McKibben
It's very well put. And the first step of doing that, I think, is the kind of work that we're doing at Sun Day or that I'm trying to do with this book, which is just get across to people the new world in which we live. 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.
David Roberts
Tell us then briefly, what is Sun Day? Is it a day? Is it a movement? Is it an organization? Is it a theme? What's the idea?
Bill McKibben
Jamie, over to you. You're in charge here.
Jamie Henn
Well, I'll take a stab at it. Well, Sun Day itself is a day of action, and it's a day of action to really celebrate the progress we've made on clean energy and then go out and fight for more. And so we're organizing hundreds of events across the United States for September 21, which happens to be the fall equinox and also the weekend before the UN General Assembly and Climate Week in New York. So a chance to kind of focus public attention around these issues. But the goal of Sun Day is to do a few big things, a few big goals.
One is to really kickstart more of a movement on the ground that can get folks involved in the work of deploying clean energy. Something we'll talk more about. Second, as Bill said, is to really be an excuse for a lot of communications. You know, we've used days of action like this in the past to try and do mass public education around different concepts, whether it's what's needed for climate or the threat of fossil fuels, and in this case, just the huge advances that have taken place in clean energy. And really drive through a few key messages that this is now the cheapest form of power on the planet, that it's generating huge amounts of jobs, that we can move forward with it in big, miraculous ways.
And then finally is the day of action itself. This is a chance for folks locally to do a whole host of work that can help move things forward, whether that's advocating at the local level to speed up permitting for solar and batteries, whether that's advocating at a school to get solar on the rooftop, or just doing a heat pump tour as well.
David Roberts
I want to get into these local examples — what, concretely, it is people might do — but I guess at the very least, I was sort of trying to get at this with Bill, like you're trying to educate people about something they're not aware of. It's just a lot more fun to do that when the news that they're not aware of is an incredibly good thing happening, rather than the world falling apart, which they weren't aware of. I imagine their ears are more open to this latter message.
Jamie Henn
Yeah, Bill should weigh in here too. But I'll say that as well. We went into this campaign and a big part of my job here is to think about how do we communicate this online. And I admit I went into it sort of thinking, "Look, one of the things that the clean energy movement needs is a really good villain." And I think that's still true in some cases. So we tested a bunch of content that said "Big Oil is holding back your clean energy. Big Oil is standing in the way of solar. Trump doesn't want you to have it." And honestly, the response that we got from folks mostly online was, "I don't want to hear this stuff, like I'm already depressed."
You know, "I already know that things are bad. I don't need more content of this." People scrolled right on by. The thing that actually engaged people was the facts that Bill was laying out about clean energy. You know, the idea that actually 90%, 96% of the new electricity installed was solar, wind, and batteries, that this was now the cheapest form of power on the planet. People just have no idea. And they say that in the comments and then they share the video to educate their friends. And so I think, as you said, not all good news is viral.
I mean, bad news travels fast too. But this is an area where I think we have incredibly exciting news on our side that we can be getting out to the public in different ways. And frankly, we just haven't done a good enough job as a movement to do that so far.
David Roberts
So you have this day, and you have these local organizations doing things on this day. Is there meant to be sort of infrastructure that comes out of it? In other words, is there an ongoing organization coming out of this, or what's meant to be the long-term play?
Jamie Henn
That's what really excites me about this process. We sort of like to say, you know, days of action in some ways are an excuse to do a lot of good organizing and communications. And it's like throwing a rock in a pond. You get a great big splash, which is exciting and important. We want news coverage on September 21, but it's really the ripples that spread that help build a movement. And so our take is, having talked with folks across the clean energy space for the last six months or a year and been mulling on this for years before that — and frankly, talking to a lot of folks who've been on Volts, is that there's an incredible amount of good work happening at the local level.
You know, there are important organizations out there like Greenlight America and Permit Power and Climate Cabinet and Lead Locally who are doing elections, but all of them don't have the air cover that they need, aren't getting the attention that they desire online, and don't have the big base to back them up. We have two people showing up at a local hearing to advocate for a clean energy project instead of 100.
The petition to support offshore wind has 1,000 signatures instead of 10,000. And so what we're thinking through is how can we use something like Sun Day to bring together a big coalition of groups across the movement and from different places as well. And we could talk more about the kind of interesting coalition of groups that do this work. But it's not just Sierra Club. It's also the YIMBY crowd that wants to build housing with solar on it. And could we create that air war and that air cover and really build more of a large mass movement that can back up the 10,000 local fights that we need to have to really deploy clean energy at scale?
David Roberts
Well, here we're getting into the meat and potatoes of it, Jamie, which is, as you know, because you've probably heard me rant about it no fewer than several dozen times, I think it all comes back to the information environment. You know, this is my ongoing obsession. I talk about it all the time. And this seems like — I'll just use as an example the fact that you've got artificial intelligence, which is being hyped and invested in so wildly beyond what it has demonstrated it can actually do, and this national blanket of hype about it. Meanwhile, there's this literal miracle happening around solar power, which is, I think, going to be much more transformative for humanity in the long term.
And you can't get people to freaking talk about it. You can't get people to point at it and go, "Wow, that's amazing!" Like they make excuses for it or they, like, you know, there's caveats or it's not a real thing. It's baffling to me. And to me, that comes down to basically the information environment. You know, the right dominates the information environment. They don't want that story spreading and connecting. So it doesn't. So this all gets back to — I'd love to hear your diagnosis, Jamie, because your whole thing is studying the information environment and thinking about how to navigate within it.
Where do you see clean energy right now in the information environment? I mean, it kind of looks to me like it's getting beat up, but, like, what's your diagnosis for currently how clean energy is doing in the information war that's going on out there?
Jamie Henn
I'd say we're losing. I'll expand. I think you're right, Dave. I think that we're getting completely outplayed when it comes to communicating to the public about clean energy. Companies aren't investing enough in it, and when they do, a lot of it is pretty stiff and bad. The climate movement has prioritized clean energy as a message, but mostly in just the political context. So the big budget ad campaigns and efforts that have been out there were intended to help pass the Inflation Reduction Act and then thank Biden for doing so. Not necessarily sell the merits of clean energy.
And so you end up with TV ads of wind turbines off in fields instead of YouTube content creators talking about how you could put solar on your house and never pay for your electricity bill again. And I think that we need to do a much better job of basically getting into those feeds and winning the meme wars that are constantly taking place out there. You know, as you said, there's a lot of disinformation at play. The typical NGO or foundation response is to write a report about disinformation. But of course, reports on disinformation don't actually help stop disinformation.
You have to be willing to get pretty messy.
David Roberts
Perhaps at some point the sheer tonnage of white papers will simply overwhelm.
Jamie Henn
It'll break through!
David Roberts
Like the grey goo they're always talking about.
Jamie Henn
But I'll say what gives me hope is that I think that clean energy is perfectly positioned to do this type of modern-day creative, multi-channel communications work because it has all the key elements, right? There's a big global threat, which I think is still an important part of the story. There's the conspiracy element of the fossil fuel industry holding back the solution for so long. There's a lifestyle element of people actually wanting to get good stuff. And you'll be amazed, you know, anytime you go on YouTube, it seems like 90% of the content is about reviewing cars or reviewing stuff for your home.
David Roberts
Unboxing stuff.
Jamie Henn
Unboxing. Yeah, unbox your solar panel. And you know, and that's a wedge for a lot of audiences that we need to be moving around these issues. You know, if you're worried about, like, dyes in your food, you know, just wait till you hear about what's in your gas stove. You know, there's a way that we can really —
David Roberts
You thought seed oils were bad?
Jamie Henn
Yeah. Just wait until you hear about the 21 toxins in natural gas. Before we hopped on the phone here, you know, I went on YouTube and saw the thing that gave me great hope was there was basically a tech creator who has 17 million followers who's doing a review where he's putting balcony solar or these plug-in solar panels that you can do on his roof in Utah, the one state where you can actually do that now. And he's ranting to his followers about how cool this is and why doesn't your state have it. And "This is illegal other places, but I'm doing it here in Utah."
And he codes as a totally kind of right-wing dad, not a climate activist. That's what's exciting to me about this space. That said, we have to actually have strategies to invest in it, to build it, and to fight it up.
David Roberts
I couldn't agree more. That, like, the raw material is there. Like, this is a technological miracle happening under the nose of a culture that claims to be fascinated by technological miracles. And this is ignoring this one, more or less. And so this is what I mean, like the raw material is there. But as far as I can tell, in these meme wars out on YouTube, on TikTok, you know, what's getting passed around Facebook groups, we're just nowhere. And I don't want to be unfair about this, but tell me if I'm wrong. I don't see anyone, much less a lot of people, I don't see anyone doing it.
Bill McKibben
David, this is starting hopefully to change, and it's interesting to kind of watch. You know, I wrote this new book that's coming out, and I did a big excerpt from it for The New Yorker, which went, you know, modestly viral in the way of these things. And the response that's been to me most interesting is coming from many, many of our colleagues in the environmental and even the clean energy movement. And they are like, "I had no idea about how fast this had come. This was still stuck in that other corner of my brain. I did not know that the Chinese were currently putting up 3 gigawatts of solar panels a day."
Which, you know, I mean, we can have a long discussion about, you know, nameplate capacity and things, but you can roughly translate that into a couple of coal-fired power plants a day worth of solar panels in China. People get very excited when you show them what's happening in other countries. Something that both you and I have written about is this miracle in Pakistan. And if you just show people the TikTok videos with the kind of Hindustani music in the background that people used in order to figure out how to install the equivalent of half the country's national electric grid in eight months in solar panels on the rooftop.
People get very excited about that. For me, this is a remarkably strange moment because, from my point of view, almost everything that's happening on Planet Earth is terrible right now. There are one bad big thing after another. And yet, you know, we're trying to bring the news here of the one big good thing that's happening on the planet.
David Roberts
You've just described my whole career in a nutshell.
Bill McKibben
There you are. And I think the other thing that's going to happen as we get this discussion going is that people are going to figure out that there are more than technical and utilitarian reasons to love this transition. So if you go to the sunday.earth website, one of the things you'll notice is how beautiful it is. And that's intentional because consciously and even subconsciously I think we want to get across the idea that this is a potentially beautiful moment. That a planet whose geopolitics has been wracked for decades by essentially fights over who controls access to oil and gas now has the possibility of running on something that's available to everyone, everywhere, all the time.
Even human beings are going to struggle to figure out how to fight a war over sunshine. And once that sinks in, people are —
David Roberts
Oh, Bill, you sweet summer child, there will be deaths over solar panels before the year is out.
Bill McKibben
You know, along those lines, one of my favorite stories of the year was this interview with the biggest energy provider in Ukraine. And he was like, "Yeah, you know, when the Russians take out one of my thermal power plants, one of my coal-fired power plants, whatever, it takes me like months to get the thing back online. But when they take out one of my solar farms, it's like four or five days, you know, I've got a bunch of panels in the warehouse, I just slap them in, the broken ones, and we're good to go."
David Roberts
Yes, yes. There's so much narrative material here that has been unused. It's somewhat baffling to me. So, Jamie, back to you. I want to ask — there's sort of two things going on here, and I'm curious which you are pursuing more, which you're preferring. One is just telling the story here that we're talking about, you know, like Bill says, there is a miracle happening and even people in our own industry don't fully get it. I mean, it's legitimately hard to keep up. It's legitimately hard to track. Like, if you tuned out for eight months, Pakistan transformed its electricity system.
So getting the news out is one thing — that's an information game, and I'm curious how you want to go about that. But then the other side of this is activism, not meant to raise awareness or all that kind of stuff, but actually accomplish things at the local level. So, like, you know, get a group of people together to go to the PUC meeting to get the PUC to reject a rate increase, something like that. So there's sort of two ways this could go. One is the information warfare. One is the actual guerrilla activism, and it's this latter thing that has really got me excited, because, when you got all those groups together in the distributed climate protest, sort of the point was the people being there.
Do you know what I mean? Like, the story was: it happened. And if you can't get mainstream media to tell that story, then, you know, nothing comes out of it. But if you get a bunch of groups together who are actually doing concrete things at the local level, then even if you can't get mainstream media to tell the larger story, the things get done, right? So how much of this are you thinking about as an information warfare thing, and how much of this is, like, actual guerrilla activism at the local level meant to win local fights?
Jamie Henn
I think I'm gonna cheat by saying both, but I think for a specific reason, actually, which is that I think the two are really intimately connected, and I think it's important to see the ways that they are, because I think that we make mistakes as a community sometimes — and I maybe extrapolate to the Democratic Party — of feeling like we do these things in a vacuum. You know, we do all of our communications work over here with its big ad budgets, and then we leave the messy work of movement building and activism up to those wacky kids over in the corner and hope that they figure it out.
David Roberts
No, no, we wait for them to do something, then we write in and tell them, "The way they did it was wrong."
Jamie Henn
Yeah, "The way you did this was wrong."
David Roberts
"You're doing it wrong again."
Jamie Henn
Yes. And I'm sure we'll get some of that. People are welcome to send that in in the comments on this podcast. But look, I think that just — I've always been impressed by the ability of distributed organizing to do both at once, to both drive a narrative and get people to pay attention to something, but to also really make concrete change at the local level. And I think take some of the past campaigns that we've worked on, you know, fossil fuel divestment is maybe a good example where that concept of divesting money from fossil fuels, a few people were talking about it.
Students at Swarthmore College had kind of pioneered a campaign like that to tackle mountaintop removal mining and the investments that Swarthmore had in it. But it really hadn't spread beyond that. We were then able to partner with groups and young people across the country and turn that into a huge cause and public debate. And both worked together because we were doing both pieces of it. On the one hand, equipping young people with the tools they needed to figure out, how do I organize on my campus to apply pressure to my administration to divest, how do I learn about this issue, what's the checklist of steps I need to take?
But then also saying, "Hey, post about it online, share what you're doing, make videos, do stunts, drive this in the media, write op-eds for your local paper, start kind of driving this debate." And lo and behold, that sort of expanded out there from there. And I think that it went in lots of different directions, not just about fossil fuel divestment campaigns, but really about the entire role of finance in climate, that now is a huge area of work. And I won't claim that we were the only player there. If anything, we saw a trend and a narrative developing and jumped on it, just like I think we're doing here.
And so when I think about the challenges we've talked about on clean energy, the communications work, and the work that needs to happen at the local level to change permitting decisions or get towns to adopt SolarApp, I think the two go hand in hand, because what we want is much more conversation online. That, of course, we can do some of that, paying for it, you know, and we need to be investing far more resources in content creators and our own channels and smart paid media. But ultimately what we want is thousands of people every single day making videos like that one I mentioned about how cool the solar panels on their roof are, because, you know, that's not just important because you see your neighbor, but that's how the algorithm works. You know, you need lots of people posting. You can't just buy one post and hope it goes viral.
David Roberts
Yeah, you need the peer-to-peer.
Jamie Henn
You need that peer-to-peer. We want to be on Nextdoor. We want to be posting.
David Roberts
They've shown that you can force that, you know, like you can construct that, too.
Jamie Henn
Yeah. And the right invests in this. I mean, I think it's important they do so and so. I'd say the two work hand in hand, and we can talk more about the organizing work in a minute or two. But I've been pleasantly surprised as kind of an activist organizer to say, "Wait a second, there are a lot of levers that we could be pulling at the local level where folks with a little bit more knowledge and a few more tools in their tool belt can really make a big difference."
Bill McKibben
And some of that work is now well underway. Jamie gave some of the groups that were Greenlight and Permit Power and things that are already doing it. And I can tell you from our work at Third Act, we've mobilized a lot of older Americans who turn out to be very good — you know, we always insist that young people be the ones who have to do this, but in fact, they need serious backup from old people. One example is that we've trained people up in most states now to really watchdog their public utility commissions. Truly important part of this thing that have been protected by a force field of their own boringness for, you know, decades.
Who's going to sit there Wednesday, Thursday, all day in some anonymous state office building someplace except lobbyists? Well, it turns out that if you've got your basket of knitting or your crossword puzzle book or something and a few of your colleagues from Third Act, then you will sit there and you will start to master this stuff and pretty soon you're making a difference. But those efforts become much easier when there's a kind of a halo of engaged, fun, interesting activism around them, of the kind that things like Sun Day provide. Then they become less boring, more musical, more artistic, more everything.
David Roberts
Well, let's go through a few more examples because I think one of the things I would like for people to get out of this, one of the things I would like to get out of this is a little bit more concrete sense of when we say "We're going to mobilize local groups to do clean energy activism," specifically, what does that mean? And I have a few specific questions about it. So, like, one is about PUCs, which Bill, you've already gone straight to because you know my love language. Obviously, monitoring and hassling PUCs is a huge opportunity here, which doesn't take that many people to do it.
But so, like, what are some of the others? And I'm thinking here specifically about a lot of these fights take place in rural areas. And as we all know, rural areas in the US are by and large completely captured by, immersed in, right-wing media, and that's where all these crazy Facebook memes about wind turbine cancer and everything are spreading. So, like, what would it look like to mobilize against that, for instance? Like, what does mobilizing people in favor of clean energy look like?
Bill McKibben
Well, let me give a few examples. I just wrote this big piece for Mother Jones that just looked at the rooftop part of this. It turns out that there the problems may be deepest, not in red states, but in blue cities and towns. And they stem mostly from this baroque and Byzantine permitting system that often means it takes many months between you making the phone call to someone to get solar panels on your roof, and they're providing power. And that's the reason that rooftop solar costs three times as much here as it does in Australia or the EU. We can change that.
David Roberts
The story you told in that piece of the — I forget what country it is, but the person's like, "Hey, I want to get solar." So they go to, like, Home Depot.
Bill McKibben
They go on vacation to Spain. They're staying with friends.
David Roberts
Yeah. In Spain, you just go to Home Depot. Like, "I want that one." And then they can put it on your house.
Bill McKibben
Two days later, they're making power. Which is how it should be. It's not like we're, you know, installing a nuclear reactor on your roof. I know. It's like, this should be as easy as putting a refrigerator in your kitchen. And that's how we should talk about it. But that's going to take some work, you know, maybe even especially in blue cities and states. On a larger level in rural America, I think that one of the ways around it — I think you had. Did you have Doug Lewin on from Texas?
David Roberts
Yes.
Bill McKibben
You know, what happened in Texas this spring was really interesting to me, and he's a great reporter, and I've been following it with great interest. You know, the fossil fuel industry was lined up to try and really decimate the Texas renewable miracle. And they had all this stuff that was just crazy. I mean, basically some of it amounted to kind of DEI for natural gas. You know, "Put in five megawatts of solar, and we're going to make you put in five megawatts of natural gas." Well, as I understand his reporting, the reason that most of the worst of that failed was because people kept showing up from rural parts of Texas in Austin to testify and saying, "Guys, this is how we pay for our school system. This is what keeps the old folks' home in business."
As someone who's lived my whole life on dirt roads in either — both red and blue parts of rural America, there's a different set of arguments that work well. Jamie was talking about the guy in Utah with his balcony solar. I know a lot of people for whom their home is their castle, which they are completely prepared to defend with their AR-15. And if they have solar panels on their roof, then they really are the kind of independent soul that they're sort of imagining themselves to be. And that's one good place to begin.
I was talking with, as I was writing that piece for Mother Jones, with all these guys at Conservatives for Clean Energy down in the Southeast. They were a big part of the force that got Ron DeSantis not to put the kibosh on local solar. And at least in the rooftops, Florida is now starting to show up as a real player in this game.
David Roberts
Georgia, too. Rooftop solar spreading in Georgia like wildfire. People don't know that either.
Bill McKibben
So it's not impossible, it's difficult because all the obvious players, you know, the Koch Network, Americans for Prosperity, whatever, are at work full time, spreading misinformation and scare stories and on and on and on. And they've had some success. Something like 15% of counties in the US are now off limits. But when you get out in those places, you find that often the biggest advocates for putting up solar farms are farmers who realize that this is a stable source of income and one that's increasingly compatible with a lot of other things. One of the great talking points and beautiful stories that capture people's imagination and that we should be talking a lot more about are agrivoltaics.
You know, the notion that you can do two things in one place and that on an overheating world, shade is a really precious commodity that we now have a new and interesting way to provide. Those are really good stories. Depends who your audience is. I told someone the other day about these new trials in France that demonstrated that yields of wine grapes went up 60% in fields with solar panels. And they were suddenly very attentive to the — I mean, you know, I'm a beer guy, so what do I know? But go where people's interest leads you.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, the whole weed industry is just sitting there waiting to be transformed by solar. Well, I mean, the whole weed industry is just sitting there waiting to be transformed by solar.
Bill McKibben
The fact that we grow that stuff indoors drives me out of my mind. I mean, they call it weed for a reason, and it's absurd that we're using huge amounts of energy.
Jamie Henn
There's something for every audience, Dave; that's the thing about this.
David Roberts
I think probably what a lot of the audience is thinking right now, what I'm thinking right now, is these all sound like great things to do. There's something cosmically ludicrous about the fact that the two of you are trying to engineer this nationwide communications and activism mobilization effort using your fricking email, you know, and like a buck fifty. Where is all the green money? Where is all the money? What is it doing? Like, billions of dollars are floating around green philanthropy. Billions. What is it doing? It would take, like, honestly, like a buck fifty to hire just like a dozen kids and just say, "Kids, go be on TikTok and talk about clean energy."
That's it. Just tell them, "Go!" You can pay a minimum wage, for Christ's sake. Like, I could practically fund that. Where is the green money?
Jamie Henn
Well, let me know if you find it too. And you know, I'll put my — you can get jamie@fossilfree.media — if any billionaires are listening, I'm happy to follow up. But no, I think it's a good question. I mean, I think there's a more serious answer, which is that, as I said earlier in the conversation, I think that philanthropy and the kind of larger movement have approached this as mostly an advocacy fight of, you know, "We're going to run big-dollar ads to impress Democrats."
David Roberts
We're going to change minds, we're going to persuade people.
Jamie Henn
And we'll convince Democratic politicians or, you know, Senator Schumer that there's enough money behind this fight that he can pass a bill and expend that political capital. And again, to some extent, that worked. I mean, we got the Inflation Reduction Act done. The problem with that approach is that you leave out this whole other piece. So when I then heard people kind of afterwards saying, "Why don't people know about the Inflation Reduction Act?" Or, you know, "Why are people not in the streets defending this and highlighting projects?" One, I mean, we named it the Inflation Reduction Act, which is, you know, just again, still blows my mind.
David Roberts
We didn't do this. Let's point the finger at the jagoff who's responsible for this.
Jamie Henn
Exactly. And second, you know, we ran a communication strategy that was basically purely aimed at D.C. and not at mobilizing the American public. And so I think that —
David Roberts
But can I just pause here and say, just for the record, because people are constantly saying this, but like, like you say it was D.C.-focused, elite-focused, and it worked. It convinced the D.C. elite, it convinced the Democratic elite, and they put in a lot of work and expended a lot of political capital to produce an amazingly ambitious bill. So, like, people crap on that strategy, but, like, it worked pretty well.
Jamie Henn
That's why I sort of say that is, I think there's a complete justification to it. And again, I think people did an amazing job. And I'll just say, you know, I'm in a lot of Signal threads and groups of people who worked tirelessly to try and go after the Big Beautiful Bill. And I think we're doing all the great work that needed to be done of getting local op-eds written, etc. That said, it's still not enough. And so, to your point of where people could invest more, I think we need to get messier and get into this space of online communications, do what the right has done really effectively, find content creators and resource them, find new channels and build them out as places, and then ideally channel all of that content back so that we're getting the data of people who are watching these videos about rooftop solar panels and plug them into the organizing effort to then go out and change the laws that are holding that back in 49 other states.
And so I think that's the infrastructure that we're trying to build. We're talking with a lot of people. We're trying to kind of build that out collaboratively. We would love to talk to funders who are interested in doing it. My pitch would be, is that it is cheaper. You know, you're getting way more bang for your buck when you're helping advertise a product via a YouTube video, collect that data for that person, and help solve the customer acquisition issue that the industry has, engage that person in local political work so that they can plug in to change regulations to help speed up all of this work.
And then as Bill said, give them a community of people who they can keep organizing with so that they're more likely to go to additional hearings and comment on Nextdoor and get in all the different places online and Reddit threads, etc., where we need to do this. So I just think that we haven't kind of invested in that at scale, in the ways that we need to. And that's the way —
David Roberts
We haven't invested in it at all.
Jamie Henn
I was being polite.
David Roberts
You know, it's wild. We haven't invested in it at all. And we're still cranking out these white papers, still cranking out sort of like politely worded press releases that are emailed to the proper list of journalists at the Washington Post. And just like we're fighting this war that, like, ended years ago, and there's this ongoing guerrilla fight in the streets of the Internet that, like, we're just not engaged in at all. It's shocking to me that no one in the green philanthropy world has done what seems to me very basic low-hanging, fruit harvesting.
Bill McKibben
David, people should take a clue from the last part of this. You're right that the Inflation Reduction Act had some elite inside D.C. organizing at the end there to put it across the finish line. But the reason that it was even a possibility was because of big-scaled activism. Greta's moment. And then followed in this country by the incredible work of the Sunrise Movement. People who had by and large come out of the fossil fuel divestment campaigns, but who figured out how to capture people's imagination. People forget now, but in the 2020 Democratic primaries, climate was polling as the number one issue.
And that's why Joe Biden, you know, that's why Joe Biden had Varshini Prakash on his transition committee. The head of the Sunrise Movement, you know, making sure that we got something that turned into the IRA eventually.
David Roberts
Of course, the entire Democratic establishment has decided, the entire elite centrist establishment has decided that the one period of time where Democrats actually got feisty and ambitious, that was where we went wrong. It was the climate activism and the race activism and the gender activism. That is what they think is the problem.
Bill McKibben
They're gonna get Mamdani'd now.
David Roberts
Well, we'll see.
Jamie Henn
Dave, as you remember — I mean, that's the beauty of having a career of being told that we're radical, silly activists on the margins and doing it wrong is that you sort of get used to not listening to those people. And it always sticks in my head of when Bill and I were along with Jane Klebb, who's now working on rural clean energy, of all things. Jane, who is a key player in the fight against Keystone XL. When we did those first sit-ins at the White House in 2011, there was a poll of energy insiders in D.C., and I think 97% of them said that the pipeline would be built by the end of the year. And of course, you know, I think Trump is still now committing to build it.
David Roberts
Last I checked, the communication environment has evolved now in notable ways that we're all sort of watching. And we know that the sort of coin of the realm now is attention. Like, no one has to pay attention to you if you issue a press release. No one has to care. Like, so everything now is about grabbing attention. And what I see is not just that the sort of big money, big establishment people on the left don't seem to get that, don't seem to do it. It's that any group on the left that does sort of figure it out and does do something that actually disrupts and draws attention, they get scolded by all the rest of the people on the left.
In other words, it's like the left is not just trying to sprout flowers, it's chopping down anyone that sticks their head up. They're like, "Oh, that might, that might offend the sensibilities of the 52-year-old white guy mechanic in Erie, Pennsylvania. Our perfect swing voter guy, he might not like that. Therefore no one can do it." So it's not just that we're not doing it, it's that we're, it almost seems like actively discouraging it. So I'm glad you're ignoring those people.
Jamie Henn
I mean, what I would say again to kind of the good news is that where we are doing it, it's going really well, and so I do want to shout out, you know, folks like Action for the Climate Emergency that works with young people around the country. Climate Power has been doing far more social content and has a creator program, and it's working. I mean, the metrics are great, it reaches people, the posts get lots of likes. I think the challenge is it's still a drop in the bucket compared to the infrastructure that they have on the right.
And so we know this can work. We do have to make sure it's connected to the activism piece of it because we don't want to just be, you know, communicating to people and then leaving them there. We want to get their email and make sure they can go to a permitting hearing. But we need to build that infrastructure out. And I think that we're really excited to do that and see that — again, for every dollar invested in it, I think it pays huge dividends. And I think there's a way for the clean energy industry to get far more involved in that as well.
I think there's been this idea that, well, because the jobs went to Republican districts, that will build political support on its own. As someone sort of slightly in the business of building political support, that's never how it happens. You actually have to get out and organize.
David Roberts
They want to be insiders, they want to be bipartisan, they want to be lobbyists in the room with all the other big boy lobbyists. And they just don't see that they're getting their ass kicked. They are in a guerrilla fight, and they've got to fight that way.
Bill McKibben
I think one place where that needs to become clearer is for the clean energy industry itself to take a little more active role. They've tried very hard to walk both sides of this politically over the years and are willing to defend the production tax credit even at the cost of lots of bad environmental policy, whatever. I think by now it should be pretty clear to them that they have no friends on the right-wing side of the aisle, and they might as well square up and do some politicking themselves.
David Roberts
They just all got together and voted unanimously to crush your industry with a boot. Like if that doesn't send the signal, Bill, if they don't hear that, what more evidence? I mean.
Bill McKibben
Well, happily, a few of them are now throwing in with Sun Day, and that's good.
David Roberts
So let's talk about the sort of big intellectual, if you want to call it that, big intellectual movement on the right right now. Well, there's a couple going on. There's the YIMBY movement, which is very interesting to me for a bunch of reasons, kind of has developed somewhat outside the usual left-right battlefield and is unlike a lot of other social movements. It's just like winning, winning over and over again — there's that. And then there's the abundance thing, the abundance push, the abundance idea, which is related to YIMBY but not overlapping. So what you guys are talking about here, marshaling climate activists in favor of building stuff, in favor of building clean energy, in favor of removing permitting barriers and removing bureaucratic barriers and removing regulations that slow these things down and all this stuff — that is the same kind of thing that the abundance people are talking about and similar to what the YIMBY people are talking about.
So I'm just curious how you see this new push in the climate area, how you see it relating to those other things that are going on? Do you see those as fellow travelers, as competitors? How should we think about this?
Jamie Henn
Well, let's talk about the YIMBY one because I feel like that's an easy one. You know, I think we really want to work closely and we've reached out to various YIMBY groups and they're getting involved in Sun Day, and we're talking about how to build affordable housing and clean energy. And obviously, the two go hand in hand in a lot of different places. Now, as many commentators have noted, there are some, you know, old school NIMBY environmentalists who don't want to see affordable housing where they live. And so, you know, I think that the movement is diverse, and those are people that we would push to say, "Hey, look, we get where you're coming from, but this is a priority, it needs to happen, and the benefits outweigh the potential harms that are on the ground."
And it's important to just remember the environmental movement, climate movement, energy movement, is an incredibly diverse array of groups even within itself. You know, you have old school environmentalists, you have young clean energy campaigners, you have old clean energy campaigners and young NIMBYs. You know, it doesn't always cut along the same lines. And so I think it's easy for the press and for commentators to paint with a broad brush and say, "Climate action activists don't like this or they don't support that," when in fact there are probably factions and diversity within that crowd.
David Roberts
But would you say that you feel some responsibility to try to advocate for YIMBY within the environmental movement?
Jamie Henn
Yeah, absolutely.
David Roberts
You are trying to change that.
Jamie Henn
Yeah. And I think, you know, Bill can speak to this more because he's written some great pieces, you know, really encouraging environmentalists to kind of understand the importance of moving forward on clean energy projects. I'll just touch on abundance quickly before handing it over to Bill. I think we really need a clean energy abundance movement. You know, I read Ezra and Derek's book. I think there's a lot in there, most of it that I really agree with. And I think when you read the actual book, it's all about clean energy and science research and all of that.
David Roberts
That's a minority strategy. Actually, reading the book is a —
Jamie Henn
Actually reading the book, I'd recommend it. And you know, and as I think Ezra or Derek, both of them, I guess, write at the beginning saying, "Look, we're going to go pick on, you know, left-wing cities because we think that progressives are the only ones who will listen to us, you know, and Republicans might not engage in this debate. So we'll make it all about, you know, going after, you know, progressives," which I think is maybe a slightly cynical PR strategy. But you know, there's a kernel of truth in that.
David Roberts
I mean, look at its success.
Jamie Henn
Look at its success. So very successful. You know, my challenge would be, I think that we want an abundance of good things. We want an abundance of clean energy, we want an abundance of healthy food, we want an abundance of social justice. I don't think we want an abundance of new fossil fuel projects and pollution and childhood asthma. There's an abundance of TikTok videos online. I don't think anybody feels like that's made our attention better. And so I think we just have to be a little bit clearer: We want good things, not bad things. And the challenge of abundance, of course, is that it's been hijacked by a lot — or is being attempted to be hijacked — by a lot of right-wing groups that have for a long time pushed a deregulation agenda that's meant to hand more power over to corporations to do whatever they want.
And in the case of climate, often fossil fuel companies who want to build more fossil fuel infrastructure. So, you know, when it comes down to the exact permitting bill fight in Congress that may play out, we'll have to see, and we may have to make tough choices about how much it will benefit clean energy over fossil fuels. But I think that's a conversation that we're really willing to have and want to debate with people, but debate in good faith. And I think that the more that commentators can kind of engage in it like that and think about, you know, "Wait a second, do we really need to be getting rid of NEPA to put solar panels on a rooftop? Like, that doesn't make sense."
I think that we can have that conversation as we go and we'd love for people in the abundance space to get more involved in the real work of organizing, to cut red tape that's standing in the way of things like rooftop solar and batteries.
Bill McKibben
And this is one reason why it's really important to keep the climate part of this conversation really engaged, because that is the deep, deep underlying threat to our civilizations. And so we're not in a position of just being able to say, "We're in favor of building any damn thing in the world." We need to be building the things that help us get out of the greatest crisis we've ever faced. Now, I've written a series of pieces now sort of trying to persuade people like me, which is to say old white guys, to stop suing, to block things that they don't want to look at.
And I think that's really important. I think it's highly irresponsible at this point to be saying, "Build that solar farm somewhere else. I don't want to look at it." And I think that's a key part of this kind of — there's a kind of moral cast, and there should be, to this YIMBY idea. And I think that the sheer fact of the abundance of solar energy, the fact that it falls in volumes far greater than we could ever make use of, is maybe the most beautiful fact about the world we live in right now. But none of that gives us permission to throw people under the bus who are fighting hard to preserve their place from real and toxic threats and so on and so forth.
That's the reason we do this work, is to try and build a world that doesn't have that stuff in it. So for me, there's a political dimension to this abundance debate, but there's also just the sheer fact of abundance. The sun, which already gives us — David, I mean, just think about it for a minute — 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.
David Roberts
Well, I want to push you both on a few more specific areas of contention because when I threw this out on social media, this is what people want to hear about. So I do see the overlap with abundance. It's quite obvious, and I think you're both right to have said in other places that green groups, despite the fricking ludicrous stereotypes about them that still dominate mainstream media, have actually been pro-clean energy for a long time and have been fighting and organizing for clean energy for a long time. They were abundance, solar abundance, before it was cool.
So there is a lot of overlap and I think, you know, the YIMBY thing fits squarely in there. But there are points of contention, and these are points of contention, I think, not just with the abundance thing, but with some larger, more powerful Democratic groups. One is, which you've both sort of touched on, is that the abundance people are explicitly pro fossil fuel development. They basically say the US's own emissions are relatively meaningless in the larger scheme of things. The US just needs to be creating and driving down the price of clean technologies and exporting them.
And until that happens, people should be running on clean US natural gas rather than whatever the dirty coal, etc., etc. You know, all the arguments basically, but like they are very pro fossil fuel. Do you think that that's just an unbridgeable chasm here? I mean, this seems like something that you can't talk your way around. It's a fundamental break between the two groups.
Bill McKibben
I just think it's nonsense because the economics are so far removed from what that is. The Chinese are now setting the pace of energy economics in this world. They're demonstrating that the only way that you're going to get to be a player in the world going forward is if you can produce lots of low-cost energy, which means energy from the sun and wind and batteries. Natural gas is not only a climate wrecker, but it's also just an outmoded old technology now that can't really compete with what we can do. And if you have any doubts about that, just watch in the next year as what happens in China starts to reverberate around the globe.
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.
David Roberts
Well, let me push you a little bit on that, on one specific thing then. As we speak, two of the groups that you helped start, 350 and Third Act, are, as we speak, fighting against the revival of nuclear power in New York State. This seems like a lot of abundance people, I think, view this as unforgivable hypocrisy. They say, "You want us to be building this. You say the trade-offs are worth it. You say the climate is a crisis. You say the climate matters more than anything else. And you say you want abundance and you say you want building, and you say you want a pro clean energy. And here you are out fighting carbon-free energy. How do you think about that, Bill?"
Bill McKibben
From my point of view, the other thing I want aligned with all of that is mathematics. And in fact, I think Third Act upstate New York is not so much opposing Governor Hochul's plan for a nuclear power plant as just pointing out that New York State had promised to build 15 gigs worth of clean energy, and that the cost of building one gig of that in nuclear power is probably the equivalent of what you'd spend to build 15 gigs of solar and wind, and that you'd get it built 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 times as fast. I don't think anybody has — I don't know anybody left who has any, you know, spends their time worrying that much about the consequences of nuclear power because, compared to the consequences of an overheated world, we can probably deal with it. I think people are just doing the math and figuring out that it does not make a lot of sense to spend your money here right now.
That's what I was saying before about Costco. You know, if people want to keep trying to shop at the most expensive boutique, then okay. But really, in a realistic world, you go buy what's cheap, available, and ready to go.
David Roberts
Well, let's talk about one other critique and maybe, Jamie, you can weigh in on this one. One other big part of the abundance book, which you, unlike most people, read, is a critique of — and here I'm air quoting — "the groups." So the idea here among abundance people is that they are these professionalized nonprofit groups that are run basically by young people who are far to the left, not only of the median American voter, but of the median Democratic voter. Basically, these nonprofit activist groups have been captured by young lefties. They are then lobbying Democratic politicians, pushing and forcing Democratic politicians to take positions that place them outside the mainstream.
And so this critique gets, you know, it's focused a lot on racial stuff, on gender stuff, on social stuff, but it does hit climate too. So the idea is like, you guys thunder out of the gate with the Green New Deal, which, like, sounded great among all the young lefties who developed it, but then, you know, it's introduced to the American mainstream. They recoil in horror. Fox characterizes it as banning cows and banning cars. And basically, Democratic politicians are stuck in a bind. Either they do what the groups want them to do, and if they don't do what the groups want them to do, they get beat up, they get spent against, they get lobbied against, or they do what the broad public wants them to do, in which case the groups beat up on them.
So green groups are part of this critique. And I just wonder what you thought about that aspect of the critique and how you — whether you have any criticism or self-criticism of how nonprofits have engaged in this fight?
Jamie Henn
Well, I think that there's a lack of understanding maybe of how kind of politics really works in some of these critiques, or at least a kind of sense of like, that there can't be a really productive give and take. And so I hate to give credit to the right on things like this. And I'm not one of those liberals who thinks they do everything right because I think that the right has its whole own huge problems and challenges. But you see on the right a real understanding of how they mobilize their fringe, their base, and then move things into the political mainstream.
And so you don't see, you know, Donald Trump and folks sort of like, you know, critiquing their fringe pieces. Sometimes it blows up in their face, like around Epstein or things. But they have sort of an ecosystem there that understands how to take ideas from their base, digest them, and then use them to really expand their political power. The left is terrible at this. You know, my experience of D.C. politicians — and maybe it's the groups that I'm coming in the door with — but tends to be that they're incredibly fearful of doing anything that would be exciting and a meme and get out there and embrace these issues.
I mean, people like Zoran are the great exception, which is why he gets so much attention at this moment. I don't think you see lots of Democratic politicians out there, you know, pushing exciting, radical concepts to engage the American public. Quite the opposite, in fact. And so I think, look, you asked for self-critique, of course. I think there are demands that activists have put forward that didn't meet the moment, that aren't popular, that won't translate well into the immediate electoral space. I tend to give activists a bit more leeway on that because I think it's not always the role of an activist on the ground to be keeping electoral math of the moment in mind.
You know, I think that if you looked back at past social movements in America and chastised the civil rights movement for doing things that were unpopular, we wouldn't be where we are today. So, you know, I think it's really the role of the grassroots to push and to try and expand that Overton window.
David Roberts
But it seems like something that's happened is the Internet has kind of flattened everything, so everybody's just a voice on your screen. Do you know what I mean? So activists are a voice on your screen. Democratic politicians are a voice on your screen. The idea that they have separate roles, that they're, like, allowed to take different strategies, you know what I mean? Like, everybody is treated as though they are an official spokesperson for all of the left at all times, which is just like — you gotta have division of labor, you know what I mean? You gotta have some people pushing and some people doing other stuff.
The Internet has just made everybody in the same pool, and it's really screwed up that dynamic in ways that I can't really capture.
Jamie Henn
Yeah. And so I think people have to be a little just more comfortable with the messiness of that and know how to work with it and, you know, know how to take the best pieces of an idea that appeals to you that you think you can use in your district and go out and run with it. And as always, kind of keep the focus on the opposition as well. You know, again, you use the Green New Deal piece of it. We were always sort of amazed that, you know, Fox News saw the power of the idea, but MSNBC never did.
David Roberts
They get it immediately. Fox got it immediately.
Jamie Henn
And they understand the importance of fighting over these things. And I think the answer is not to never say something compelling again. You know, that's not the way. That's not going to work out well for us. The answer is to figure out how do we fight for it more effectively? And I think that goes to a lot of what we've been talking about today.
David Roberts
Well, yeah, it's the information — I mean, to get back to the information environment. But like, I think a lot about the Green New Deal episode because when it was introduced, you know, there were some specifics attached, but nobody really officially — there was no official version of it. No one really owned it. There was just a lot of — it was just a fertile idea. It was a fertile platform on which you could have built almost anything. So like a smart political party would have said, "Look, here's this incredibly fertile idea that is just — it's like a container. We can put whatever we want in it. It's a marketing vehicle that already is potent, already is powerful, already catches the imagination. We can just put whatever we want in this container and let that be the flag." Like, if we don't like the radical stuff, if we don't like the jobs guarantee or whatever the hell piece of it we decide we don't like, just ignore it, just drop it. You know what I mean? Like, that's what they do with the radical ideas on their side. They don't go debating them in Washington Post op-eds, they just ignore those parts and let them drift away.
Just like put whatever agenda you want behind this. But like instead, because it drew attention, it drew Fox attention. Fox poisoned it. And because Fox poisoned it, now the whole left is like, "Oh, well, it's poisoned. We gotta stay away from it." I'm just like, "You guys are just gonna do that over and over again!"
Jamie Henn
To bring us up to the moment we find ourselves in now. You know, it's the right and Trump and Republicans who are way out of line with the American people. You know, if you go look at polling, the vast majority of the public supports clean energy. They want more clean energy jobs. They want to see these investments in America. They don't want more fossil fuels. And so I think that we have to, you know, really embrace that. There's a kind of self-flagellation on the left of like, "Nobody likes us, nobody agrees with us. So we're not going to talk confidently about these issues."
This is a moment to go to absolute battle with the other side and blame them for the rising electricity prices. Facts are on our side, but I think the narrative is on our side as well. And we need to be confident going out there and doing that, and be a little less fearful of our own shadow, but a little bit more creative about how we get the message out there.
Bill McKibben
Amen. The polling shows that people love the sun and that solar energy is powerful and polls beautifully across partisan lines. This is one of the places to make this stand, and that's why we're doing it.
David Roberts
One thing that really grabbed me in your Rolling Stone piece — I guess I don't mind the idea of abundance. I don't mind the whole abundance push. There's something to it. I don't know how it is as a slogan or whatever, but the idea that government should, you know, provide for people is great. I'm all for that. But you use a word toward the end of your Rolling Stone piece that just, to me, is much more fertile, much more sort of intriguing. And that word is "liberation," which I think has some of the same implications, but also some more.
Packs a little bit more in there. So maybe by way of taking us out, just talk a little bit about what you mean when you say — and you sort of gestured at this before — you know, there's more to this than just the economics, the physics of providing power. There's more to solar power than just different electrons. There's something beyond that. So maybe by way of concluding, talk a little bit about what you mean by liberation.
Bill McKibben
Absolutely. 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." When I borrowed the title for this book from George Harrison, I'd always loved that song, Here Comes the Sun.
Abbey Road was the first record album I bought with my own money at the age of nine. So that's, by the way, a high bar to begin with. But I didn't know that Here Comes the Sun was the most popular song in the Beatles catalog. At least if you go by streaming on Spotify, twice as popular as Hey Jude or Let It Be. And I think it's because there's something so optimistic and gentle about that song, so pregnant with the possibility of a very different world that we could wake up to, where the systems and structures that have governed our lives begin to melt away a little bit.
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.
David Roberts
I probably should end there for poetic reasons, but I remembered one other point I wanted to cover, which is just, I think a lot of people, when they hear "This will free us from dependence on the people sitting on the oil," they think, "Well, won't it then make us dependent on the people sitting on lithium or silicon?"
Bill McKibben
No, because this is a good point to make, because it really makes this point more real. There is no such thing as a free lunch. There's only more expensive and less expensive lunches. And so there are very real costs that go with mining lithium, say. And we need to do what we can to make sure that it's done as humanely and environmentally soundly as possible. But when, the minute you start thinking about this switch, you understand how huge it is. If you go mine some lithium and you stick it in a battery, then it sits there doing its thing for the next 25 years.
If the battery is eventually outmoded, we now can cost-effectively recycle the lithium and start again.
David Roberts
You do not have to keep feeding lithium into it.
Bill McKibben
If you go mine coal, you set it on fire, and you have to mine some more tomorrow.
David Roberts
Yes. This is such a crucial point. You only have to pull the minerals out of the earth once.
Bill McKibben
Once. 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.
David Roberts
Yeah, because I really think the vision of a closed-loop material cycle is kind of the final piece of the puzzle here. Do you know what I mean? Like, once you get that in your head, you're like, "Oh, I can actually start to imagine humanity living on Earth in a way that's not eating our seed corn." Do you know what I mean? In a way that's not sort of like burning down a fuse, in a way that's sustainable.
Bill McKibben
David Roberts, this is the place where your nerdy soul meets your rock music soul, man. And you have the final epiphany that gets you where we need to go.
David Roberts
Yes. All the energy we need falling on us from the sky, all the minerals we need to harvest that energy already dug up. We're just recycling them over and over and over again. And then we're stopping the vast systematic plundering of the earth for fossil fuels that we have been doing for hundreds of years. It sounds so sci-fi that people are not letting it sink in and really into their hearts. But, like, that world is in sight. It's just over the horizon. It's a real possibility.
Bill McKibben
Sun Day, baby.
Jamie Henn
I was gonna say, Bill, as a good organizer, we'll end with the ask, which is that's the world we're trying to kind of give a sneak preview of on Sun Day on September 21, so listeners can help go to the website and organize events or attend events. There are already some solar-powered, battery-powered rock concerts in the works, but we need many, many more. We have a great artistic ambassador, Antonique Smith, a singer who's going to be singing Here Comes the Sun, has been doing that around the country. So, lots of fun to be had.
And I will say, it really is fun. I've been in this work now for a couple decades, not nearly as long as Bill, but I'm doing my best to catch up. And what keeps me going is that the activism piece of this is actually super fun: to go out there and cause some trouble and get these ideas out and actually get our hands dirty, making some change in our communities and not just kind of talking about it from the sidelines. So we're eager to kind of recruit folks into that fight and partner with people too, because our approach has always been this has to be a movement of hundreds and hundreds of groups.
We're not trying to set up the one new organization, but really empower all of us to go out there and do the work together.
David Roberts
All right, guys, that's a great place to quit. It's beautiful. It's just nice that after years and years of saying, "We're doomed, we're doomed, please pay attention to how doomed we are." It's like the cavalry is coming, and we get to be the ones to tell people that the cavalry is coming. It's like, what a fun twist of fate.
Bill McKibben
Here comes the sun.
David Roberts
Thank you for all your work over the years. Thank you for this, and good luck with this going forward.
Jamie Henn
Thank you, Dave. Onwards.
Bill McKibben
Take care, man, and thank you so much for all your education.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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