How Solar Energy Could Transform Geopolitics

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with the longtime journalist and environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book The End of Nature is widely seen as one of the first to bring the idea of climate change into public consciousness. His latest book, Here Comes the Sun, is altogether more hopeful, exploring how solar energy is already transforming energy markets.

In the month of May this year, China created more new wind and solar capacity than the electricity, from all sources, that Poland installed in the entirety of 2024. While part of the outlandishness of this statistic is because of companies racing to take advantage of expiring subsidies, it shouldn’t obscure the bigger picture that the sheer scale of Chinese industrial policy has made the mass global proliferation of clean energy a very real possibility. Could it eventually save the planet?

In the month of May this year, China created more new wind and solar capacity than the electricity, from all sources, that Poland installed in the entirety of 2024. While part of the outlandishness of this statistic is because of companies racing to take advantage of expiring subsidies, it shouldn’t obscure the bigger picture that the sheer scale of Chinese industrial policy has made the mass global proliferation of clean energy a very real possibility. Could it eventually save the planet?

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with the longtime journalist and environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book The End of Nature is widely seen as one of the first to bring the idea of climate change into public consciousness. His latest book, Here Comes the Sun, is altogether more hopeful, exploring how solar energy is already transforming energy markets.

Subscribers can watch our full conversation in the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast for free. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Ravi Agrawal: You’re usually telling us how bad things are going to get. And here you are now focused on hope. Why?

Bill McKibben: Well, things are already bad. We’ve raised the temperature of the Earth by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). We’re seeing catastrophic results. The hurricane that hit Jamaica a few weeks ago featured the highest winds ever recorded, at 252 miles an hour. That same day, we had possibly the biggest rainstorm ever measured: 5 feet of rain in 24 hours in central Vietnam, the kind of storm you can only get on a globally warmed planet.

So the things that scientists have been worrying about for 40 years are coming true.

But we finally have a scalable and affordable weapon to go after some of this. Energy from the sun and wind, what we used to call alternative energy, is now the straightforward path ahead. Ninety percent of new electric generation around the world last year came from sun and wind and batteries.

This isn’t “alternative” anymore. It’s the most obvious way to proceed. Four or five years ago, we crossed an invisible line; it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That’s a pretty remarkable moment for a species that’s spent the last 700,000 years making its way by setting stuff on fire.

RA: Right now, most energy is generated from fossil fuels. Nuclear energy is probably about 10 percent of the total pie.