How Bill McKibben Lost the Plot

Some years ago, my colleagues and I used to joke that after the revolution, all essays about climate change would be written by Bill McKibben. This was during the final years of the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, when McKibben was ubiquitous in the mainstream media. In every year between 2015 and 2021, he published at least two and up to as many as six articles in the New York Times. At the same time, he was writing a regular column at the New Yorker while also publishing in virtually every leading center-left publication in the country: the New Republic, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Nation. No major legacy publication, it seemed, was exempt.

McKibben’s revolution, though, is looking tenuous these days. The tactics and rhetoric of the climate movement, and its outsized influence on the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, have sparked a terrible backlash, both among the public at large and within the Republican Party. In the face of rising energy and electricity prices, the Biden administration’s abandonment of “all of the above” energy policies, its seeming hostility to the production and use of America’s abundant oil and gas resources, and its willingness to kowtow to the climate movement helped doom Biden’s and then Harris’s election prospects.

The price of hitching the climate movement and the clean energy future wholly to Biden and the Democratic Party has also been steep. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress are not only in the process of laying waste to the Biden-era climate and energy agenda but have now turned the very same tools that environmentalists and Democrats long used to try to regulate fossil energy out of existence — NIMBYism, targeted taxes, permitting — against renewables, likely to far greater effect.

But at this dark moment for the climate movement, McKibben has good news. After decades of failed predictions, grand promises, and public subsidies, his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, heralds the arrival of a solar energy revolution. Solar, in McKibben’s telling, is now the cheapest source of energy, clean or dirty, on the planet. And it will keep getting cheaper. Backed by the full might of Chinese mercantilism, nobody — not Exxon Mobil, Donald Trump, or the vast right-wing conspiracy — can stop it.

McKibben’s solar revolution has unfurled with startling rapidity. The last two years, he argues, have marked an epochal technoeconomic shift. And yet, despite a lot of solar deployment during that period, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence of a shift in any of the key greenhouse-gas emissions metrics. The vast majority of global energy continues to be produced by fossil fuels, a fact that hasn’t much changed for decades. The Chinese “electro-state” that McKibben says represents the future doesn’t look appreciably different in this regard than the U.S. “petrostate” that he says is now trying to hold that future back. Both still depend on fossil fuels for about 80 percent of their energy consumption.

Across Here Comes the Sun’s narrative arc, what is apparent is that despite McKibben’s best efforts at optimism, the epochal shift over the last two years that actually animates the book is the return of Donald Trump. Here Comes the Sun is a rearguard action, not a victory march — an effort to sustain the climate politics that McKibben has played such a crucial role in constructing over the last generation at an existential moment for his movement.

Arguably, McKibben’s omnipresence in the world of climate journalism has been well earned. His first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989, launched climate change into public consciousness. Since then, he has written prolifically on the topic.

But McKibben has also long since ceased to be a journalist in any recognizable sense of the term. Since the early 2000s, he has held various positions, currently an endowed chair, at Middlebury College, from whence he launched the modern climate movement — including 350. org, a grassroots advocacy operation with a $20 million annual budget; campaigns against the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines; a global fossil-fuel divestment movement; and much else.

When he writes for publications like the Times, McKibben sounds like a journalist. His prose is peppered with colorful subjects and fascinating back stories. His essays overflow with citations of academic publications, news stories, and well-­credentialed experts. He is a master of the medium: modest, self-­deprecating, folksy, unfailingly polite and reasonable, part Sunday school teacher and part science educator.

But he is always also, as they say on Wall Street, talking his own book. Because he is so deeply and centrally involved in shaping the strategy, tactics, and messaging of the climate movement, when McKibben reports on climate change, he is essentially covering himself.

Consider his October 2023 New Yorker column on the Biden administration’s pending decision on whether to permit new natural gas export facilities. Titled “A Smoking Gun for Biden’s Big Climate Decision?,” the essay breathlessly related the latest study by Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, which found that because of methane leakage, liquefied natural gas exports are worse for the climate than coal, despite the fact that natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide. What McKibben didn’t tell his readers, across some 2,000 words, was that Howarth had released the study, which had yet to be peer-reviewed, at McKibben’s request, to provide him with ammunition to sway the Biden administration in his campaign to block the facilities.

What has made McKibben so influential in recent years is his unprecedented combination of roles: as movement prophet, ecovisionary, and preeminent mainstream chronicler of the “climate crisis.” But it also makes him a quintessentially unreliable narrator. When he dedicates long sections of his New Yorker article, and his new solar book, to describing Howarth’s bona fides as a truth-telling voice confronting a chorus of gas industry shills, for instance, a savvy reader will be wise to ask whether Howarth’s work might also be controversial among his academic peers. And indeed it is. Howarth’s estimates have long been outliers in the mainstream literature on methane leakage.

McKibben’s claims in Here Comes the Sun about solar and renewable energy must be similarly parsed. “In the first month of 2025,” he reports in the opening pages of the book, “sun and wind combined made up 98 percent of new generating capacity in the States.” This sort of statistic pops up throughout the book. Eighty percent of new generating capacity in the United States in 2024, he tells us later, came from solar and batteries. “2024 was a breakout year in California: there were finally enough solar panels that for parts of most days the state could produce from renewable sources more than 100 percent of the electricity it used.” California is not alone: “There are already days when rooftop solar power alone is supplying more than 100 percent of power across South Australia.”

These claims are factual but not factful, to use the late Swedish epidemiologist Hans Rosling’s memorable distinction between statistics that are used for illumination and those that are used for support. Due to their variability, wind and solar energy have low capacity-factors. What that means is that compared with gas or coal or nuclear power plants, which can produce electricity around the clock and on demand, solar and wind produce power, on average, at about 25 percent and 35 percent of their maximum capacity, respectively, on an annual basis. So all those solar and wind facilities added in the month of January 2025 will only provide electricity to the grid about a third of the time.

Once you understand the capacity factor problem, it also casts McKibben’s excitement about places like California and South Australia in a different light. Because solar panels typically produce electricity at only about a quarter of their capacity, producing enough solar energy to meet all of California’s total electricity demand would require installing solar generating capacity sufficient to meet four times the state’s average daily demand. And if that were to be done, the problem then becomes that solar panels would produce far more electricity during many time periods than the state could use. On a sunny day in May, when air conditioners are still mostly off, solar capacity sufficient to meet the state’s total electricity demand on an annualized basis could produce four times or more as much electricity as was needed on that day.

Solar overproduction is a problem for electrical grids and can be addressed in one of three ways. You can curtail generation at times when there is excess. You can build long-distance transmission lines to ship it off to somewhere else. Or you can use batteries to store it. Each of these tactics is already being deployed in California and other places with relatively high shares of solar energy. But each is limited.

With 30 percent of California’s total electricity generation now coming from solar, the state is already frequently forced to curtail solar generation, undermining its economic viability unless it receives continuing subsidies. McKibben blithely reassures his readers that the respective variability of solar and wind are complementary and can take up the slack for each other. “Wind tends to build in power later in the afternoon, just as the photovoltaic effect begins to ebb,” he writes. “Not only that, but the farther north you go, the stronger the wind gets — which is useful, since Norway has rather less sunlight than, say, Greece.” Which sounds great until you think about what would be necessary to transport solar electricity 1,500 miles from Greece to Norway each afternoon and then wind energy from Norway to Greece each evening. In reality, both the United States and Europe have had a hard time building much transmission at all, much less doing so at a scale that would remotely allow the sort of complementarity that McKibben suggests is the solution.

And while batteries can store energy from solar or wind for times when they are not generating electricity, the scale of batteries that would be necessary to store the equivalent of a grid’s worth of electricity not just for a few hours but often for days is simply implausible. McKibben quotes an electricity analyst from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, who notes, “if you have four-hour battery storage, that can get you through a dunkelflaute,” which is a German word for a wind or solar drought. But those periodsin fact often last for days or even weeks.

For these reasons, practically running a grid with a lot of low capacity-factor wind and solar requires having something equivalent to a second fossil energy grid standing by. This turns out to be an expensive proposition and helps explain why most places that have a lot of wind and solar on the grid also have very high electricity prices. California, which McKibben holds up throughout the book as a vanguard of the coming solar revolution, has one of the highest electricity prices in the nation. McKibben chalks this up to the added cost of mitigating climate-fueled wildfires sparked by the state’s utilities. But those costs only account for a small portion of the state’s exorbitant electricity prices.

McKibben’s solar tubthumping is in service of a call to action. A month after the book’s release, he is helping to put on a nationwide event called Sun Day, a revival of Jimmy Carter’s 1978 event of the same name, which led to the installation of solar panels on the White House a year later. “Much of the progress that engineers have made,” McKibben writes, “has come on the back of inspired activism, something we need more of. In this fight, the solar panel and the wind turbine are both the crucial machines and also the symbols of potential liberation.”

This is a curious capstone to a book that, from start to finish, has argued that solar and wind are the cheapest and most reliable sources of electricity everywhere in the world. Why, one wonders, does McKibben repeatedly defend the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies for wind and solar if they don’t need subsidies to outcompete fossil fuels? Why is it necessary to protest and march and campaign for solar energy if it is already inevitable?

His answer is that an unholy alliance of fossil fuel interests, self-dealing utilities, right-wing ideologues, and NIMBYs is holding back the inevitable energy transition. And while there is a grain of truth to each of these claims, none of them, individually or together, can explain why a technology that is as cheap and available as McKibben claims requires all that marching and activism and, most of all, subsidies.

McKibben, for instance, repeats longstanding claims that the fossil fuel industry has sowed doubt about the reality and severity of climate change, and has undermined actions to tax, regulate, and otherwise restrict fossil fuels. But even accepting these claims, which have often overstated the scale and impact of those efforts, these facts can’t explain why private parties, including utilities, businesses, and households, are unwilling to invest in or deploy wind and solar power that is cheaper than the incumbent fossil energy alternatives, in McKibben’s telling.

This brings us to the real reason solar and wind continue to require subsidies, policy mandates, and political action for continued growth: wind and solar are not nearly as cheap as McKibben says they are. Yes, the wholesale cost of adding a kilowatt of solar or wind capacity is relatively cheap and continues to fall. But that is not a full reflection of the real cost of these sources to a utility, a grid manager, or an end user.

As noted earlier, the cost of storing, transmitting, curtailing, and backing up wind and solar is substantial even when wind and solar comprise only a small slice of the total electricity generation pie. McKibben cites a 2024 report from the investment bank Lazard (another outlier when it comes to estimating the costs of electricity generation) on the levelized cost of electricity — the average over the lifetime of the power plant — which he says finds that solar costs half as much as gas and coal.

But in the same report, Lazard also estimated how much solar and wind would cost when the cost of backing them up with fossil fuels or batteries was included. When those costs are factored in, the advantage of wind and solar, even in Lazard’s highly optimistic cost estimations, disappears. This is because depending on the region, wind and solar can cost 50 to 100 percent more once the costs of their intermittency, which is imposed upon grid operators and ultimately end users, is accounted for.

It’s hard to imagine that McKibben missed that chart. It’s right there in the report, a few charts after the one he cites. This is the sort of information that a journalist more interested in enlightening his readers than proselytizing might want to share with them. But McKibben is not that kind of journalist anymore, if he ever was.

Besides the cost and practicalities of providing reliable electricity with variable sources like wind and solar, there is also the small matter of the rest of the global energy economy, the 80 percent of global energy consumption for uses other than electricity — for transportation, agriculture, industry, and heating, among many others.

“Electrify everything” has become something of a rallying cry for the climate movement over the last decade, the idea being that for virtually every process that today requires fossil energy there is an alternative process that uses electricity and can be powered by wind and solar energy that is better, more energy-efficient, and ultimately cheaper. McKibben captures this idea with a clever mnemonic about the difference between burning fuels and moving electrons. Burning fossil fuels to create steam or compression to move a turbine to move electrons is much less efficient than using the sun to move electrons directly — when photons hit a photovoltaic panel, or, a little less directly, when they heat the earth to create the wind that spins a turbine. The same is true for electric vehicles and heat pumps, which use electricity to deliver energy directly — by turning the wheels of a vehicle or powering a heat exchanger. These processes are much more efficient than combusting fossil fuels in a cylinder or boiler.

But there are also hugely important industrial processes where McKibben’s rule does not apply at all. Fossil fuels are used not only as a source of heat but also as a chemical input for many foundational industrial processes. Coal has been a central element of steelmaking for centuries because it not only melts iron ore but also contributes carbon molecules to the chemical process of converting iron to steel, which is an alloy of carbon and iron. Natural gas has similarly been the fuel of choice for making synthetic fertilizer, because it provides the hydrogen molecules needed to make ammonia in addition to the heat and pressure the reaction requires. Natural gas and petroleum are likewise chemical inputs to a huge range of refining processes, most notably plastics, as well as providing the high temperatures required to produce petrochemical products. Metallurgical coal is even used to make the kind of silicon used in photovoltaic solar panels.

McKibben has a lot to say about the hyper-efficient miracles that are heat pumps and electric vehicles and almost nothing to say about any of the other things that one would need to electrify for the solar future his book heralds to come to be. Instead, he brushes all these challenges away with his simple moral juxtaposition — moving electrons good, burning things bad — relying for the most part upon a single source to support the notion that such a transformation is not only theoretically possible but plausibly imminent.

Much like Howarth, McKibben depicts Mark Jacobson, a Stanford engineering professor, as a singular voice under siege from a corrupt energy establishment. In reality, he is a notorious figure in climate and energy circles, best known for suing a fellow researcher who co-authored a critique demonstrating that Jacobson’s modeling of the U.S. energy system was wildly implausible.

In McKibben’s remarkable retelling of this sordid tale, Jacobson is the victim, suffering “abuse” at the hands of his critics. What actually happened is that Jacobson sued the journal that published the paper, PNAS, and selected a single one of the twenty co-authors to sue as well, a young researcher named Christopher Clack who was not affiliated with any institution with pockets deep enough to support his legal defense. Jacobson told Retraction Watch in an interview that he expected the journal and Clack to settle. When they didn’t, he dropped the lawsuit, and the D.C. court awarded a half million dollars in legal fees to PNAS and Clack.

Toward the end of Here Comes the Sun, McKibben disses ChatGPT for “churning out prose so limp it darkens the heart.” But excepting the final chapter, where McKibben turns mystical about the sun, it is not at all clear that querying ChatGPT to write a Bill McKibben book about solar energy would have produced anything substantively different. Virtually every argument in the book has been well rehearsed by McKibben and many others over the last decade or so, and some for far longer.

This gives a hint at Here Comes the Sun’s real purpose, which is to offer exhortation, not revelation. It is an encyclical of sorts to McKibben’s followers to keep the faith at a moment when the climate movement is under siege not only from the populist right but, increasingly, from the center-left.

If McKibben’s great intellectual and journalistic achievement was to put the issue on the map in the late 1980s, his great political achievement, over the last 15 years or so, was to center the issue in Democratic Party politics. Through his serial campaigning against fossil fuels and his unparalleled access to mainstream center-left media, McKibben made climate change a litmus test issue within the party. Even moderate Democrats learned to talk catastrophically about it.

Climate change remained a relatively low-priority issue for voters. But by the time Joe Biden assumed the presidency, it had arguably become the top policy priority for national Democrats, so much so that Biden and Congressional Democrats largely jettisoned from the Inflation Reduction Act the traditional kitchen-table priorities — health care, child tax credits, and the like — that had featured in Biden’s original Build Back Better proposal, and that historically constituted the core Democratic value proposition to the party faithful and to the median voter.

In the wake of the crushing defeat at the hands of Donald Trump and the rollback of virtually all Biden-era climate policy, many mainstream Democrats are now questioning the wisdom of having outsourced so much of the party’s energy and environmental agenda to McKibben and the climate movement. Newly elected Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego has talked about the need for Democrats to be for “big-ass trucks” in order to appeal to Hispanic voters. The new “Abundance” faction within the party is broadly challenging a generation of environmental orthodoxy and policy, from housing to nuclear energy to federal permitting rules enshrined under the National Environmental Policy Act. While most Democrats and many center-left abundance proponents continue to adhere notionally to McKibben’s climate catastrophism and solar maximalism, the post-pandemic era has brought energy realism back into fashion in both the United States and Europe.

Germany’s overhyped Energie­wende, which McKibben had spent the prior decade promoting, turned out to be built on cheap Russian gas. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe has undertaken a mad dash for non-Russian gas, much of it supplied by U.S. producers (hence all those export facilities that McKibben opposes). Longstanding EU rules restricting nuclear energy, largely established at the insistence of anti-nuclear Germany, have melted away as the continent comes to terms with what would be necessary to meet its climate commitments without compromising energy security and economic competitiveness.

While McKibben was proselytizing a World War II–style mobilization to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines in the United States, the global energy transition was being built upon authoritarian Chinese state capitalism’s production of photovoltaic cells, underwritten by federal tax credits and driven forward by blue-state deployment mandates. As the costs of those policies have come home to roost, even California’s progressive Democratic leadership has reversed course, first on nuclear energy and then on the state’s draconian clean fuels mandates. At the federal level, national Democrats have signaled that, despite their distaste for Trump’s anti-renewable and energy-dominance agenda, they are ready to work with Congressional Republicans on far-reaching federal permitting reform.

Even McKibben has attempted to refashion himself as something of an abundance advocate. “We have worked hard … to oppose the expansion of the fossil fuel industry,” he tells his readers. “And we’ve tried to slow the permitting of huge new liquefied gas export terminals and to demand that the oil industry stanch the flow of methane from its wells.” But that is not enough. “The job now is not just to block bad things,” he writes, “it’s to build good ones.”

McKibben isn’t exactly recanting the obstructionist commitments of the environmental movement. Late in Biden’s presidency, he was still calling on his newsletter readers to block bipartisan efforts to reform the National Environmental Policy Act. He offers no apologies for the role he played in pushing Democrats to oppose oil and gas development and infrastructure. And his interest in building good things appears to extend only to solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles.

But it is a sign of the times that even McKibben appears to recognize that the climate movement’s obsession with choking off the production and use of fossil fuels, and its unwillingness to actually support clean energy when it offends green sensibilities, have made the movement increasingly toxic even within the Democratic Party.

Ultimately, there is a valedictory quality to Here Comes the Sun. With The End of Nature, McKibben brilliantly mapped the old postwar environmental ethics onto the new global challenge that was climate change. It came at just the moment policymakers and the international community were looking for a new basis upon which to rationalize the post–Cold War international order. Climate change, more than any other issue or concern, offered the promise of global multilateral collective action.

As the geopolitical divisions of the Cold War melted away, globalization, internationalism, and democratization seemed to promise that humanity might turn the peace dividend toward efforts to take on collective challenges. The climate issue, in this sense, could only have achieved the prominence that it did in the minds of Western elites at the End of History.

And then history came roaring back: a global pandemic, a land war in Europe, inflation, high interest rates, supply chain shortages, geopolitics, Donald Trump and the rise of the populist right.

Every one of these developments undermined foundational commitments of McKibben’s climate movement, displacing climate change in the apocalyptic imaginations of Western publics and policymakers and reminding the world that material abundance was not so assured as many had imagined — and that cheap, reliable energy, whether clean or dirty, was the lifeblood of all modern economies. Perhaps most of all, the rise of Trump and the populist right exposed just how deeply disconnected contemporary environmentalism and the climate movement had become from public sentiment.

In that final mystical chapter, McKibben treats this latest work as a bookend to The End of Nature. He invokes pre-industrial and indigenous sun worship to suggest that the coming solar revolution might heal the rift with nature that the Industrial Revolution created. Humanity will use the energy of the sun to stop the buildup of gases that trap the sun’s energy, closing a circle that has spanned McKibben’s entire career. But what his new book really marks is the end of an era that McKibben largely wrought, where serious people believed that climate change rivaled nuclear warfare, pandemics, and asteroids as existential threats to human civilization, and believed that a world of eight billion people living modern lives could be powered predominantly, or even entirely, with wind and solar power. In Here Comes the Sun, McKibben has, unwittingly, written that era’s eulogy.