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Charli: Back in 1989, before I was born, one of the first major books on what we now call ‘the climate crisis’ hit the shelves. It was written by a 29-year-old journalist and nature lover from the green mountain state of Vermont, in the northeastern United States.
'The End of Nature', he called it. A cheery title. In its pages was a troubling message: by burning fossil fuels, humans had begun to rewrite the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere. The natural systems we depend on had started to come undone. No place on Earth was spared. ‘Nature’ as we knew it was no more.
The writer, the son of two journalists himself, had learned early on to speak truth to power: he was 10 years old when he watched his father get arrested protesting the Vietnam war.
And he could see nature changing in his own backyard. The unusually long, scorching hot summer of ‘88, with its record-low rainfall, prolonged drought and wildfires that tore through the West.
And he’d heard the alarm bells from scientists – who, in that same year of unusual heat, testified global warming had well and truly begun.
When he wrote The End of Nature, this author thought a rational, scientific case for climate change would be the end of the story. It wasn’t. He went on to write 7 more books on the climate, get arrested for protesting the Keystone pipeline, and build global climate activist movements. But it’s only now, almost four decades since he put pen to paper, that he says he feels as if we’re on the precipice of extraordinary possibility – a way out of climate breakdown and the inequality that fuels it.
Today, we ask Bill McKibben about fighting warming, inequality and authoritarianism – with solar power.
Miniseries jingle
Charli: Hey, I’m Charli Shield. Co-host of Living Planet...
If you’re just joining us for this miniseries, welcome! It totally makes sense to start with this episode, but to get the full experience, I do recommend listening to the other two when you’re done with this one.
This week, in the third and final part of The Switch, we’re pulling some of the threads together and zooming out... in a conversation with legendary American environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben.
Bill: I’m Bill McKibben. I’m a writer and environmentalist from the Green Mountain state of Vermont.
Before we get to what’s going right, we need to look squarely at where we are. Bill might be confident about some progress being made, but the picture he paints at the start of our conversation isn’t a rosy one.
Bill: I know too much climate science for that. We're in a desperate place. We're watching earth shattering catastrophes every week.
Catastrophes like hurricane Melissa, which recorded the highest wind speed ever experienced in the Atlantic when it hit Jamaica – a storm supercharged by climate change. And the heaviest rainfall ever measured in Vietnam: 1.7m - five feet, seven inches, in 24 hours. Flooding made many times more likely by a warmer atmosphere.
These are the kind of events climate models warned us about. They're just arriving faster than predicted. And that gives the situation we’re in an urgency that most other societal debates simply don’t share. Healthcare, welfare, education – these are different political beasts, Bill argues.
Bill: In America we've been fighting about national healthcare for my entire life. And I think we should have it like every other country in the world... The fact that we delay means that people will die and go bankrupt in the meantime. But it won't make it harder to do once we actually decide to do it.
Climate change is not like that.
Bill: Once the Arctic's melted, it's not like anyone's got a really good plan for how you freeze it back up again. And that's where we are. We are crossing, or near to crossing, the series of one-way ratchets, irrevocable thresholds. Look what's happening with the operation of the jet stream as the poles warm. The jet stream draws its power from the temperature differential between the equator and the poles. Now it's gone wonky, gets stuck for long periods of time with weird weather on either end.
Even more dramatically, look what's happening to the great currents of the Atlantic, like the Gulf Stream. As fresh water pours off a melting Greenland into the North Atlantic, the salinity and hence the density of that water is shifting. It's that density that drives what's the greatest heat distribution engine on planet Earth. That's now flickering, faltering.
Scientists now warn that the Atlantic Ocean’s all-important circulation is heading toward a tipping point. If it flips, they predict average temperatures could drop by several degrees Celsius in North America, parts of Asia and Europe – leading to much more extreme temperature swings, droughts and more sea level rise.
Bill: So, unless we do this quickly, it won't matter much.
As Bill readily admits, part of the job he’s set himself in life is to bum people out. It comes with the territory of naming the scale and the pace of the damage human activities are causing Earth’s systems. And you may be feeling a bit bummed right now. But as we heard at the top, Bill is also convinced that while so much seems to be going wrong, one big thing is going right.
Bill: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that if we wanted to stay on anything like the pathway we set out in Paris just a decade ago, we'd need to cut emissions in half by 2030, which by my watch is four years and three months away, not a great deal of time. The only tool we have in that time that really matters, that scales quickly enough, are sun, wind, and batteries. And happily, in at least a few places around the world, they're scaling at the kind of pace that at least gives you some sense of what's possible.
And that tool is scaling in particular in China.
China is central to the world’s energy transition. It's currently the largest greenhouse gas emitter, home to nearly 1.5 billion people and an enormous amount of industry and manufacturing. What happens there has a big impact on the global climate.
And China, it seems, has largely decided to go electric.
It’s investing more in clean energy tech, transmission and storage than any other country. Analysts predict that in 2025, China will install 66% of the entire world’s new solar capacity and 69% of its wind capacity.
Bill: China produces, or has the factory capacity to produce, an extraordinary number of solar panels, terawatts a year.
As China electrifies transport, buildings and industry, it’s churning out so many panels and turbines that it's pushing down prices for everyone. And that, analysts have found, is paving the way for a long-term global decline in fossil fuel use.
This churn has helped solar become the cheapest form of energy in history. And now that it’s cheap, it’s booming. At the moment - though this figure will soon be outdated, no doubt - the world installs roughly 1 gigawatt of solar every 15 hours. A ‘gigawatt’, by the way, is about the daily output of a typical coal-fired power plant. Since mid 2024, wind and solar have been scaling faster than any technology in history.
It may be the greatest crisis facing humanity, but no one is moving as fast as China. So what's driving them?
Charli: Why is it that most of the clean energy revolution is happening in China at the moment?
Bill: I think it probably speaks volumes to the foresight of the Chinese authorities. Look, not my favorite government in the world in some ways. I'm well aware that if I'd spent my life doing in China what I've been spent my life doing in the US, I would have spent my life in jail. But it's a country run by engineers. They're capable of looking at a set of facts and reaching a set of conclusions.
Five years ago, their cities topped every list of the most polluted urban areas on earth. And that was really calling into question the legitimacy in some ways of the communist Chinese government. I mean, if they couldn't provide decent air for people to breathe, there was a kind of limit on their lifespan, I think. They also understand just how vulnerable they are to climate change. Look, most of their manufacturing base across the Pearl River Delta is a meter or two above sea level.
But they also understood that there was an extraordinary technological opportunity here, and hence economic opportunity... So as the Chinese system does, they set out systematically to exploit what they saw as those advantages. And now they’re in the driver’s seat – literally, the EV’s driver’s seat – in the global economy.
And with this technological dominance, many wonder if another kind of dominance will follow.
Bill: I think when world historians tell the story of the last nine months, it'll be the story of the surrender of technological and economic primacy from America to China in the course of a single year. And with that, I imagine, will come political primacy in some form as well.
Charli: And people are concerned about that. How would you respond to some of those concerns that this dominance will give China undue, outsized influence on the world?
Bill: Well, if people are concerned about it, then, you know, shame on us for not making sure that America or the West was in that place. Joe Biden did his very best to get America back in the game. That's what the Inflation Reduction Act was about...
Charli: So, too bad, catch up?
Bill: Well, I think what will happen really is that we'll start to understand that it's not quite the threat that some are imagining...
For the last two hundred years, history has told us the same story: control energy, and you’ll likely control economics and politics. But Bill doesn’t really see how renewable energy could have that same effect.
Bill: ...when they sell you a solar panel, it's not like selling you a barrel of oil, you know. If you sell someone a barrel of oil, you've got them hooked on a system where they need to keep coming back to you over and over and over again for the next barrel of oil, ad infinitum. That's how John D Rockefeller became the first plutocrat, you know.
When you sell someone a solar panel, what you're selling them is access to the sun. And the sun, for whatever peculiar reason, has decided not to charge us for energy. It just delivers it every morning when it rises above the horizon. So I think, obviously this will benefit China, but I think they're playing more of an enabling role for the rest of the world than anything else.
Fossil fuels have long given enormous wealth and power to the countries that happen to sit on top of them – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Qatar, the United States of America. Coal, oil and gas are in limited, concentrated supply across the world. And since that’s what we’ve been using to turn the lights on for the last 150 years, the control of these resources has basically determined world politics. It still does. Bill believes that this is where renewables could be revolutionary.
Bill: Right now, we mostly rely on a resource, fossil fuel, that's only available in a few places. And so the people who control those places get too much power and too much money. But Vladimir Putin has more of the hydrocarbon business than anybody in Europe. He used his winnings to launch a land war in Europe in the 21st century.
Contrast that with a world where people could get a lot of this commodity that they need no matter where they are.
When we talk about poor nations around the world going into debt crisis or having a balance of payments crisis, or needing the IMF to structurally adjust their economies, it's generally because they've been paying so much money for the next tanker load full of oil that they need to run whatever kind of economy they have.
If you cast your mind back to Morocco from episode one of this miniseries, this will sound familiar. Like many middle- or low-income countries, from Chile to the Philippines, Morocco spends an enormous chunk of its annual budget on fuel shipped from abroad - while its healthcare, welfare and education systems go sorely underfunded.
And even then, in most places doing it tough, many people still don’t even have access to electricity.
Bill: There's 700 million people in the world, mostly in Africa, without any access to electricity, and a couple of billion with bad access to electricity. And it's always expensive and unreliable and so on and so forth. Those 700 million people are never going to get electricity from the fossil fuel grid. We've had, you know, we've been burning coal for 250 years and it's done absolutely nothing for anybody, most people across Sub-Saharan Africa, you know. It's not going to happen.
But solar and wind power could change that.
Bill: The UN says 90% of people who are going to get power for the first time between now and 2050 will get it from solar power.
Over the past year, solar imports have been surging across Africa. From South Africa to Namibia to Eswatini, rooftop solar panels are popping up over the continent. Analysts tracking the rise say it’s still early days. But a massive boom, like the one we saw in Pakistan in 2024, could be on the horizon.
And with such a boom, Bill believes, could come the rewiring of what he calls “the cartoonish inequalities” and “grotesque privilege” that permeate our world.
Bill: These places could run on sun and wind, and if they did, they'd have a lot more money to spend on useful things like schools and clinics.
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There are concerns about this particular path forward that Bill is proposing. Mainly, that it puts too much faith in technology to fix a problem others argue is really about much deeper societal issues like inequality, overconsumption and wealth accumulation. Issues that will take more than a technological fix. Despite the rise of renewable energy, critics argue, the wealth gap keeps widening and emissions keep rising.
Bill says he agrees that more is not more - and he actually thinks that societies will eventually come to that conclusion. But he doesn’t think that kind of attitude change is going to happen fast enough for the climate timeline.
Bill: The link between human happiness and economic accumulation is not tight in the way that economists quite imagine. That said, given the place where we began this conversation, which was on the timely nature of the emergency that we face, the need to deal with it in a matter of years, a decade, do I think that human desires and systems are going to fundamentally shift over that period? I don't. 100 million human beings enter the consumer class every year, mostly in Asia. My guess that they cannot be immediately dissuaded from treading the same path that we have treaded for the last century or two. So I think that we better come up with a way to meet legitimate human needs. Hot showers, cold beer with technology that doesn't destroy the planet in the process.
Technology, like solar panels and wind turbines, that Bill believes could take a bite out of inequality.
Bill: I think, as I've said, that it's fairly subversive technology in a way. If you really were worried about capitalism and the inequality of the accumulation of too much money in particular places and so on, I can't think of any more practical measure.
Making clean technology also comes with its own environmental and social harms. A lot of mining is involved in dredging up all the precious metals needed for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. All the lithium, cobalt, copper, graphite, neodymium and nickel. The metals that allow sunlight and wind to be transformed into energy we can use.
From Mongolia to the Congo to Brazil, communities have been devastated by the damage this mining causes. Contaminated water, habitat destruction, and in some areas, human rights abuses and the destruction of sacred Indigenous sites. It’s not like mining has to be this way, but historically, it often has been.
A more difficult question than “can we shift our energy system from dirty to clean,” Bill wonders, is “can we do it fairly?”
Clearly, these concerns need to be taken seriously. At the same time, Bill points out that phasing out fossil fuels should actually result in far less mining and environmental harm overall.
Bill: In the first place, if what you're worried about is mining, and we should be worried about mining because it's almost always a scourge on the planet, does damage to the landscape and to the people who inhabit it. If you're worried about that, this transition should help. You go mine some lithium and cobalt and we should do it as humanely as we can. You put that in a battery and there it sits for 25 years, doing its job. You go mine some coal, what do you do with it? You set it on fire and then you have to go mine some more the next day.
Currently, the world mines about 8 billion tons of coal every single year, and extracts billions more metric tons of oil and gas.
Compare that to the entire volume of metals needed for a net-zero transition by 2050: analysts crunched the numbers, and they estimated it to be less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone.
Researchers at The Rocky Mountain Institute, which is an independent energy transition thinktank, predict that by 2050, all the mining ever required for battery minerals will be complete – because we can just take minerals out of old products and recycle them over and over again.
Meanwhile, scientists and engineers are busy redesigning the tech itself. They’re coming up with products that require far fewer precious metals and, sometimes, completely different stuff. New batteries designed in the UK for example use sodium instead of lithium. And sodium is the sixth most common element on Earth. These salty batteries are already powering buildings in Australia and electric cars and scooters in China.
Fewer materials that can be recycled will also mean lower ongoing costs.
That brings us back to one of the roadblocks – something that could derail progress on this one, big thing.
Charli: So, if our problem is not prohibitive costs for this technology... What do you see as the main obstacles ahead here?
Bill: I think there are two. One is vested interest, which is very powerful. The oil industry has purchased at the moment the American government, which is busy shutting down wind farms and solar farms. So that's a big deal.
Since the Trump administration took office in January 2025, 13 million acres of federal land has been opened to coal mining. And the White House has announced plans to open another 1.3 billion acres of US coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling. Meanwhile, the US has exited the Paris Climate Agreement, frozen renewable energy grants, and cut environmental protection spending.
The US may in the spotlight right now, but it’s not alone. Australia has opened and expanded more than 10 coal mines in the last three years. While Norway‘s biggest oil company plans to drill more than 250 oil and gas wells over the next 10 years.
In each of these countries, fossil fuel lobbyists are very influential. An analysis of campaign financing on the last US election cycle found that fossil fuel interests spent $445 million to influence Donald Trump and Congress.
The thing is: renewable energy is cheaper than the current system. That much we’ve figured out. For the majority of people, it’ll save them money, if not in the immediate short term, then certainly in the long term. But some people will lose money.
Bill: Well, so the CEO of Exxon said something interesting last year. He said, we're never going to invest in renewable energy because it doesn't offer above average returns for our investors. And he's right. You know, once the solar panel is up, mean, people are going to be, they're probably already are solar billionaires or millionaires anyway. But you can't make Exxon scale money doing it because once the panel is pointing at the sun, The sun just delivers the energy for free.
On every count, this is the cheapest possible way forward. And it would be a shame if we just said, well, we can't do it because no one will become a billionaire in the process.
Indeed, Saudi Arabia reportedly earns $170,000 per minute for its oil and gas output. For years, Saudi has fiercely fought global attempts to phase out fossil fuels, including at the most recent global climate talks in Brazil.
Bill: And the other problem is inertia. Humans don't move all that fast on stuff, and now we need to move fast.
The window to stay within 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is all but shut. At our current pace, we have about three years left before we blow through the carbon budget that keeps us under that threshold. Three years.
Beyond that, of course, every ton, every scrap, of emissions matters. Scientists say each tenth of a degree of extra warming pushes about 100 million more people out of a livable climate and into ‘unprecedented heat exposure’.
And there is one more crucial thing: if humans actually cut carbon and methane emissions to zero, scientists believe warming could stop. The climate could stabilize within a decade or two.
It’s been clear for some time now that solutions exist. Many of them may be shining right out of the burning ball of gas above our heads - unlocked by scientists, engineers, builders, and electricians. Whether we grab hold of these or not on a scale big enough to matter, Bill thinks, is possibly the greatest test of human ingenuity, camaraderie and empathy there ever was.
Bill: I've always thought that climate change was just pretty much a test of whether the big brain was a good evolutionary adaptation or not. It clearly can get us in a certain amount of trouble, and it clearly has given us some ways out. My guess in the end is that the bigger question will be how large is the heart attached to the brain. This is not only a necessary transition and a utilitarian one in economic terms, but also a very beautiful one. Look, the sun already provides us with light and with warmth and via photosynthesis with our supper, and now it's willing to provide us all the power we could ever need in relatively benign ways.
Charli: Bill McKibben, thank you so much for your time, it’s been fascinating speaking with you.
Bill: It’s been a real pleasure for me. Many, many thanks.
Bill McKibben’s latest book is called Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. He has a weekly newsletter called The Crucial Years, and a climate action group for over-60s, called Third Act.
I’m Charli Shield. This episode was written and produced by me. It was edited by Neil King. I did the sound-scaping, Neil did the final mix and our studio technician was Jürgen Kuhn. If you haven’t heard the previous two episodes, you can find them in our podcast feed, which is available on any and all podcast platforms. If you want to reach out to us with feedback, an idea, or a question, you can send us an email at livingplanet@dw.com. Or you can now send us voice messages by going to speakpipe.com/livingplanet and just pressing record. Living Planet is produced by DW in Germany. Thank you so much for listening.
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