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Energy Bookshelf: McKibben's Here Comes The Sun [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-10

Unless you have been in a coma for several decades or living in Donald Trump's dystopian mind, these two things are quite evident truths:

The climate crisis is worsening.

Solar power is growing exponentially.

Confronting these two realities feeds into a long-described self-description as a pessimistic optimist. The reality is that humanity has already created significant disruption to the earth's system with serious and mounting negative climate change impacts (on humanity's prospects and ecosystems). And, while the climate crisis is ever more ominous, it is also reality that clean tech (solar, wind, electrification, ...) is increasingly proving to be not just a cleaner but a cheaper and better path forward for humanity that could -- just might -- deploy fast enough to displace fossil fuels and put the brakes on worsening of the climate catastrophe.

With Here Comes the Sun, Bill McKibben has produced what might be the most important pessimistic optimist book ever written. He is clear-eyed about the climate crisis, this includes honest engagement about painful choices that the worsening situation is driving, while making clear there is reason for optimism that not only do we have the tools at hand to stop worsening the problems but that those tools increasingly provide higher quality for lower cost than the fossil-foolish systems they can displace.

Let's be clear, there are so many reasons to respect Bill and his work. Author, activist, organizer, collaborator incredibly caring and decent human being -- let us sing Bill's praises elsewhere but consider the book. Like essentially everything he's written, Here Comes the Sun is replete with beautiful and skillful writing; interesting and thought-provoking perspectives; and, an envious passion. In this case, a very serious melancholy pessimism about the damage we've caused and the very serious potential (even likelihood) that we will not act in accord with the level of crisis combined with a well-informed optimism that we can effectively, equitably, and even profitably leverage solar power to stop worsening the crisis (and even start to turn the tides).

McKibben's End of Nature, the first book truly speaking to mass audiences about global warming and climate change, fundamentally changed my way of viewing the world. The entire idea of "unspoiled" nature ended with a realization that pollution from fossil fuel burning (more recent realization, fossil fuel processing into micro-plastics) literally had impacted every single creature on earth and every square inch of the planet. While far more familiar with the subject space decades later, reading Here Comes the Sun is sparking much thinking about how to conceive the climate crisis and clean energy revolution.

An example of this, with clean tech, is fire obsolete?

With solar and wind do so cleaner and less expensively, fire isn't necessary to make electricity.

With induction stovetops working better (faster, safer), fire isn't necessary to cook.

With heat pumps warming and cooling more quietly and safely, fire isn't necessary to heat.

With electric cars providing better performance at lower cost, fire isn't necessary to move.

With ...

Controlled fire is among humanity's earliest and perhaps most continuously used inventions. With Here Comes the Sun, Bill McKibben makes a compelling argument that this invention, ever so central to millions of years of human existence) has -- in just a few years -- become OBE: overtaken by events. From the book's opening paragraph

We're quite suddenly at the moment where ... we could and should break the habit of burning things. We could and should extinguish the firs in our power plants and factories, beneath the hoods of our cars, in our basements and kitchens, replacing those blaze with the fire of the sun. ... we could leave fire behind. We don't really need it anymore.

In the pages that follow, Bill makes clear the necessity for leaving fire behind while making it abundantly clear that life will be better with the fires in our rearview mirrors.

Perhaps more than any other of his works, Here Comes the Sun should be broadly read. Every library should have copies, schools should be teaching it, business leaders reading and discussing it, ...

NOTE: Bill McKibben is on a book tour. If you can, you will not regret taking the time to hear him speak in person.

And, figure how you can engage with Sun Day, Sept 21, 2025.

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