The price for this clean energy has fallen 90 percent in the last decade: we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, and the second-cheapest is to catch the breeze in those majestic turbines.
And as a result, around the world we’re suddenly installing it at a record pace. Right now, every 18 hours, humans put up enough solar panels to equal a coal-fired or nuclear power plant. You can see it happening in California, which used 25 percent less natural gas to make electricity last year than the year before, simply because it now has so much clean energy. Or in Pakistan, where farmers used 35 percent less diesel to run their irrigation pumps because they installed so many solar panels. We could do this everywhere.
And if we did, we’d have a chance to start catching up with climate change. The International Energy Administration has said we need to double the pace at which we’re installing sun and wind—that’s hard but it’s doable.
But it will take overcoming the power of Big Oil. They’re scared by the sudden rapid rise of clean energy—that’s why they spent unprecedented sums electing Donald Trump.
Now he’s doing all that he can to stop the growth of sun and wind.
Big Oil’s problem, though, is that people love power from the sun. Because it’s clean, because they can control it, and because it saves money.
We’ve spent so many decades talking about ‘alternative energy’ that it’s hard for us to realize the power of this moment. We’re used to thinking that sun and win are nice but pricey—the “Whole Foods” of energy. But actually they’re the Costco of energy—cheap,
available in bulk, on the shelf.
Sun Day is about driving home all the possibilities: of energy free from billionaires and oligarchs, of energy controlled by our communities instead of imported from Saudia Arabia, of energy that helps the planet instead of wrecking it.
It’s not about a ‘technofix’ to the climate problem: it’s about taking advantage of the fact that the sun pours unlimited clean energy down on this earth every day. It’s our way of not just playing defense against the rich and powerful as they try to wreck our
democracy, but of going on the offensive—taking advantage of their enormous vulnerability.
And this is as exciting a project as the moonshot of the 1960s—except that this time, instead of landing a couple of men on another planet, we need to bring our star down to earth and use it to power this gorgeous world.
So start making plans to join us on Sun Day, during the fall equinox on the weekend of September 20 and 21. We’ll rally on e-bikes and parade on EVs, we’ll gather for concerts and to install solar panels on community centers, we’ll turn on green lights in the windows of homes across America that draw their power from the sun and wind.
We’ll make some beautiful trouble on behalf of the future!
A letter from Bill McKibben