Keen On

It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben. But in his new book, Here Comes the Sun, McKibben argues that the sun - or, at least, solar power - might actually save the earth. There’s a pagan quality to McKibben’s manichaean message: the sun, he says, offers both last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. McKibben's optimism, he guarantees, is anything but naive cheerleading—it's grounded in the hard numbers of energy economics. Solar power has quietly become the cheapest energy source on earth, triggering what he calls a "warp speed" buildout, particularly in China. While the climate crisis continues melting ice caps and breaking temperature records, McKibben sees this energy transition as our one scalable tool that can move fast enough to matter. Move fast and fix the world. The timeline is unforgiving: climate scientists say we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. The question isn't so much whethe