Episode #268
Bill McKibben: Here Comes the Sun for Farmers

Bill McKibben makes the case that the fastest path away from fossil fuels may also open new possibilities for agriculture. He explains why solar and wind have become the cheapest sources of energy, then turns to what that could mean on the ground for farmers: more stable income, productive land use, pollinator habitat, and a growing interest in agrivoltaics. This conversation explores why solar power for farmers is about more than energy. It is also about resilience, biodiversity, and a different vision for rural landscapes

Our Bill McKibben interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Bill McKibben via Zoom, January 2026:

Dave Chapman
Welcome to the Real Organic podcast. I am privileged today to be talking with Bill McKibben. I last talked with Bill five years ago. Bill is the founder of 350.org and Third Act, both of which are focused on the climate crisis. He is the author of 21 books, starting with “The End of Nature,” and his most recent book is called, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.” Welcome, Bill.

Bill McKibben
Good to be with you.

Dave Chapman
It’s great. Your history – you’ve been labeled the seer of dark truths. You’ve told a lot of things that are very hard for people to hear, and it can be overwhelming. This book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” is a true departure from that.

Dave Chapman
I’m curious how much of that shift into a note of optimism was just that things are turning around, and how much was a realization that telling hard truths made it hard for people to hear your message.

Bill McKibben
I don’t have any trouble telling people hard truths, including in this book. I think all writers owe is honesty, anyway. Look, the hard truths that I told back in the 1980s about what was going to happen with climate change, when I wrote the first book about what we then called the greenhouse effect, have all come true.

Bill McKibben
We’re now living in the world of fire, flood, sea level rise, and storm. It’s happening faster than the scientists told us that it would, but otherwise, we’re right on track with all those grim predictions and the grim results, and we can see them in every corner of the country and every corner of the world.

Bill McKibben
It’s only a year ago that large sections of the second largest city in our country burned to the ground in an unprecedented firestorm that came after record temperatures and record drought, on and on and on. We’re living in a moment of democratic challenge, at the very least, in our country. A dark takeover by authoritarian, racist forces that are literally, in this last month, executing Americans in the street. It is as dark a moment as I remember.

Bill McKibben
But with those two big bad things happening around the planet, the climate collapse and the authoritarian rise in so many places, there’s one big good thing happening, and that’s this sudden surge in clean, renewable energy. It’s a big and good enough thing that I think it presents some real possibilities for dealing with those two overriding crises.

Bill McKibben
Not stopping global warming, it’s too late for that, but perhaps shaving tenths of a degree off how hot it gets, and at the same time weakening the oligarchs and others whose rule often depends on their control of the scarce supplies of fossil fuel that currently run our civilization but no longer need to do so.

Bill McKibben
The fact that we now live on a planet where the sun and the wind provide the cheapest possible energy, something that’s only been true for a few years but is an incredible shift for human beings. That fact gives one some hope for a very different future than the dark present we’re currently inhabiting.

Dave Chapman
For people who haven’t read the book, and I recommend that everybody read the book, it’s powerful, and it is hopeful, and it does present a path forward. You just said that solar and wind are offering the cheapest possible energy on the planet. That’s a radical statement. It might be the truth, but it’s almost shocking to most people.

Bill McKibben
Yes. That’s because at their invention, which isn’t that long ago, these were the most expensive power sources in the world. 1943 was the first industrial wind turbine in the world. It was here in Vermont. 1954 was the invention of the first solar cell at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was so expensive that the only thing you could use it on was satellites because there wasn’t much choice.

Bill McKibben
But engineers and activists have kept the pressure on for the intervening six decades. We’ve gotten better and better at doing this, and four or five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal, oil, and gas.

Bill McKibben
That, in turn, has sparked, as it were, a remarkable, very, very rapid growth in these energy sources. It’s most obvious in China, which has put up more than half of the clean, renewable energy on the planet, and by last spring, was building solar panels at the rate of about three gigawatts a day. A gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a big coal-fired power plant. So they were putting up one of those out of solar panels every eight hours.

Bill McKibben
But it’s observable here too. California was using 40 percent less natural gas to produce electricity this year than it was two years ago, and that’s because it’s put up so many solar panels and so many batteries that store power for use at night.

Bill McKibben
In California now, the biggest source of supply to the grid is often batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon, batteries that didn’t exist even three years ago. California has now been surpassed by Texas as the fastest-growing clean, renewable energy state in the country, which obviously carries certain irony, since Texas is also the world headquarters of the hydrocarbon industry.

Bill McKibben
The real proof of how fast this is happening is the depth of the pushback against it from the Trump Administration. You’ll remember that candidate Donald Trump told oil executives that if they gave him a billion dollars in donations, he’d give them anything they wanted.

Bill McKibben
Once he was in power, they came up with about half a billion between donations, advertising, and lobbying in the last election cycle. That was enough, because he’s done everything they could have asked and more, including shutting down wind farms that were 90% complete off the New England coast, banning solar power from huge swaths of federal land, on and on and on and on.

Bill McKibben
So America may be bucking this global trend, although even here in 2025, something like 99% of new generation that came online last year was from sun, wind, and batteries. So it’ll take them a while to completely blunt this, even in the U.S., and around the rest of the world, it continues to accelerate.

Bill McKibben
We have to make it accelerate faster, and the reason is the climate crisis. If we didn’t have this hanging over our heads, then we could wait for economics to take its course, and 40 years from now, we’d run the planet on sun and wind.

Bill McKibben
But if it takes us anything like 40 years, then the world we run on sun and wind will be a broken world. Our job is to speed up that transition. Of course, that’s what we’re all about at Third Act, which we can talk about at some point, if you want.

Dave Chapman
I absolutely want to talk about Third Act, but let’s save it for a minute. I think this is really important. One of the things that I am fascinated by here is that we are fighting the economics. We are fighting against the winning hand that we all have been dealt.

Dave Chapman
It’s especially confusing because China is going the other way. America is supposed to be the capitalist country, and China is supposed to be the communist country. What’s going on?

Bill McKibben
One way to understand that is to understand that, from a certain point of view, the problem with clean energy, solar energy, is that it doesn’t make enough money for the people who control it. Which is to say, the CEO of ExxonMobil said last year that his company would never invest in this renewable energy technology because, “It doesn’t offer above-average returns for investors,” and that is true.

Bill McKibben
You can make some money putting up solar panels, and there are already solar millionaires and probably billionaires, and there’ll be more, but you can’t make ExxonMobil-scale money, because once the solar panels are up, then the sun delivers the energy for free every day when it comes across the horizon.

Bill McKibben
From ExxonMobil’s point of view, that’s the stupidest business model of all time. It replaces one where we all have to write a check to the oil industry every month of our lives for the next supply of energy. That’s the reason they’re so desperate to stop it. It’s very bad news, what I’m telling you, if you own an oil well or a coal mine.

Bill McKibben
It’s very good news for everybody else. But our political system is so easily gamed. We allow money to play such a large role. That they’ve seized the opportunity here.

Dave Chapman
Why doesn’t China also say, “Hey, we have a lot invested in oil”? Why are they…?

Bill McKibben
China doesn’t have all that much oil. They have a lot of coal, but their coal has polluted their cities to an extraordinary degree, and that pollution was beginning to undermine the legitimacy of the government, and so they were eager to get rid of it. And probably more to the point, the Chinese government has come to realize that the people who control this technology control the future.

Bill McKibben
What’s happened over the last year is truly amazing. I don’t think there’s ever been a kind of active national self-sabotage quite like it. The country that, again, invented all these technologies has basically handed them over, lock, stock, and barrel, to our theoretical main adversary in the world.

Bill McKibben
The Chinese managed to sell, in dollar volume, half again as much green energy tech last year as the U.S. managed to sell in oil and gas. We’re having our lunch eaten, and we’re catering the lunch. It’s truly astonishing to see.

Bill McKibben
The good news is, I guess, that the atmosphere doesn’t really care where the reductions in carbon are coming from. But if you’re a patriotic American, it should frost you some.

Dave Chapman
I am a patriotic American, as well as a patriotic world citizen. I have to say that as I realized that the Chinese were basically taking over Africa, and the U.S. was moving out of Africa, saying, “Well, we don’t want the influence,” at first, I thought it was a very bad thing. Now I’m wondering, because I see that they’re bringing in solar technology instead of oil technology.

Bill McKibben
I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa, West and East, watching the spread of solar technology. There’s 600 or 700 million people in Africa who don’t really have access to reliable electricity. Coal, gas, and oil might as well not have ever been invented, as far as they’re concerned, because it never did them a lick of good.

Bill McKibben
In the course of a few years, hundreds of millions of them are getting access to power for the first time, thanks to solar technology. These community solar microgrids that are going up are astonishing to behold, a complete miracle.

Bill McKibben
When we get solar power in the States, it’s good, but it doesn’t change our life in any way. You just still flick the switch on the wall, and the light comes on. But if you’ve never had a switch on the wall or a light that it might control, then the difference is truly astonishing.

Dave Chapman
All right. I am really interested in that five-year-ago tipping point where suddenly, from a business perspective, it was cheaper to invest in solar than it was to build another power plant. I’m curious, because until that point, getting to that point seems like it was totally dependent on activists and, as you said, engineers, who were working toward a saner system, but one that the economy wouldn’t necessarily lead us to.

Bill McKibben
A perfect example of the thing that made it happen, maybe the biggest single event, was about 25 years ago in Germany, when the Green Party held the balance of power in their parliamentary system. They used that leverage to get the government to agree to pay a hefty subsidy to anyone who put a solar panel on their roof. That cost the Germans a lot of money.

Bill McKibben
But that demand is what allowed the Chinese to start getting good at building low-cost solar panels. That combination of activism and engineering is the kind of thing that finally got us to this point. It would have been nice if we’d gotten there 20 years earlier, and we almost certainly could have.

Bill McKibben
Jimmy Carter, in the late 1970s, was trying to put the U.S. on a strong solar course. His last budget proposed to put aside money for solar R&D such that the U.S. would be getting 20% of its power from the sun by the year 2000. We unfortunately elected Ronald Reagan instead. He took Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House.

Bill McKibben
More importantly, he took all that money out of the budget and delayed us by at least a few decades. Those few decades are going to translate into meters of sea-level rise and millions of square miles of the Earth’s surface that people won’t be able to live on anymore because it’s too hot, underwater, on fire, or whatever.

Dave Chapman
We face just a similar situation in organic, where you get far less than one percent of the research budget of the USDA for promoting and developing organic. Of course, chemical agriculture gets huge subsidies. As a result, it appears to be very inexpensive at the cash register.

Dave Chapman
But we’re paying for that, and if we paid for something else, then organic would become very cheap at the cash register, as well as five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, in your health, in your old age, and all of those things.

Bill McKibben
Joe Biden tried hard on this energy front. He passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which was all about helping Americans afford the upfront cost of solar panels, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. The Republican Party, which, again, at this point is a tool of the oil industry, immediately took all those things away as soon as it was in power.

Bill McKibben
Now we have the work that we can do even while Washington is engaged in this grotesquery. The work that we can do is at the state and local level. We’re working very hard at Third Act on a campaign we call Simplify Solar. Americans pay about three times as much as Europeans or Australians to put solar panels on the rooftop.

Bill McKibben
In this case, it’s not really because of the cost of the panels. The tariffs add a little, but basically it’s just extreme overregulation and excess bureaucracy. In the rest of the world, if you want solar on your roof, you call up on Monday morning, the guy shows up by Wednesday, hammers away on the roof, and by Friday, you’re connected and pouring solar power onto the grid.

Bill McKibben
In this country, it takes months: inspections after inspections, drawings back and forth, and on and on and on. This is ridiculous. This should be like installing a new refrigerator. We’re hard at work with this Simplify Solar campaign to get jurisdictions around the country to allow apps, for instance, for solar permitting and things like that.

Bill McKibben
We’re making some real headway. We have to, because without support from the federal government in the form of those subsidies, we need to lower the price as fast as we can.

Dave Chapman
Bill, is that something that’s primarily done on the state level? In other words, could Vermont have a very enlightened policy?

Bill McKibben
California, New Jersey, and Maryland have adopted instant permitting through these apps, although many of their municipalities haven’t yet really figured it out. But yes, we work at the state and local level.

Bill McKibben
There are 15,000 jurisdictions in this country, mostly state, city, and county governments. Each one of them has its own set of rules; they need to be standardized and streamlined.

Dave Chapman
Well, that’s something we can work on here.

Bill McKibben
Yes. It turns out that at Third Act, which is this thing we started for old folks like me, where we have about 120,000 Americans over the age of 60 now, we’ve gotten very expert at figuring out how to do this. Older people often, because they have both good connections and a lot of time, turn out to be exemplary at this work, and it’s really been fun to watch that happen.

Dave Chapman
Okay. Let’s talk about Third Act, because I’m an old guy, too. I agree that I have interests, and I do have a lot more time than I did 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago, and I also have more money than I had 50 years ago. I’m better able to act on these ideas. Tell us about Third Act.

Bill McKibben
We started it three or four years ago, and it’s grown like Topsy. We’ve got chapters in almost every state now, and they’ve become extraordinarily effective. I see the Yukon sweatshirt that you’re wearing. The Connecticut chapter is amazing, and they’ve become a lobbying force in Hartford, partly because legislators know that there is no known way to stop old people from voting. We all vote, and so they pay serious attention.

Bill McKibben
The two things we work on are protecting our climate and protecting our democracy, because we think they’re the two things most under threat. We’ve been hard at work on both, and it’s been good work in a bad moment.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, absolutely. I’m curious, is there an active effort to connect this with young people, who have been the lead on so much of this?

Bill McKibben
Absolutely, we do. One of our main principles is to follow young people whenever we can, and we have, from the start. In fact, the very first protest that Third Act engaged in four years ago, just as we were forming, came because young people from the Fridays for Future movement, the kind of offshoot of Greta Thunberg’s school strike campaign, got in touch with me

Bill McKibben
They wanted to take on the big banks: Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, which are the main funders of the fossil fuel industry. But they said, “We’re high school kids. We don’t have checking accounts. We don’t even have credit cards. Will you help?” I was like, “Well, yeah. The one thing we’ve got is credit cards.”

Bill McKibben
The very first protest we were at in Boston, there were several hundred high school kids. They really understand the barrel of the gun down which they are staring. They’re somewhat spryer. So they were at the head of the march, but at the back of the march, there were a bunch of us from this nascent Third Act with the big banner that just said, “Fossils Against Fossil Fuels.”

Bill McKibben
Kids were happy to see it. In fact, my sense is that the much-discussed climate anxiety among young people is an anxiety more about the fact that they feel they’ve been left to deal with these crises entirely by themselves, and they’re very grateful when other people show up to help.

Bill McKibben
If you want to make your grandkids think that you’re something special, then this is a good thing to be engaged in.

Dave Chapman
Could you explain what’s the First Act and what’s the Second Act…?

Bill McKibben
First act is when you’re young, and the second act is your, sort of, working, child-raising years. What’s interesting is that if you’re in your third act now, if you’re in your 70s or 80s, or whatever, it means that your first act was in that period, the 1960s to 1970s, of epic social, cultural, and political transformation in this country.

Bill McKibben
When we started taking women seriously in public life, the apex of the civil rights movement, the first Earth Day in 1970 had 20 million Americans – 10% of the then population – in the street. We know that we can be effective and powerful because we’ve watched it happen.

Bill McKibben
That’s a great gift to be giving to young people right now, who I think are deeply wondering whether it’s even any use trying to stand up to power and not knowing if they can be effective or not. One of the things that older people can do is attest to the power of an organized citizenry.

Dave Chapman
After a recent No Kings rally, somebody said, “I don’t know if I should do that. What’s the point?” I actually heard a great answer, which was, “If you can get three and a half percent of the population to protest nonviolently, the world changes pretty dramatically in the political realm.” Do you believe that?

Bill McKibben
Yeah, I don’t think the number is exact, and any of that, but I do think that the two great inventions of the 20th century, for my money, were the solar panel and the nonviolent social movement. I think it’s an incredibly elegant piece of technology that offers the only chance for the small and the many to stand up to the mighty and the few.

Bill McKibben
I’m eternally impressed by the number of times that when we organize, we win. When we fight, we win. I see no reason to stop at this point.

Bill McKibben
Do you think that it is necessary to have the kind of formal training in nonviolence that the Civil Rights marchers actually went through, and also Gandhi and his followers? They were very disciplined.

Bill McKibben
Yes, they were. It’s probably helpful, but I don’t think it’s absolutely… I don’t think that depth of training is always required. I’ve been extremely impressed by what the people of Minneapolis have accomplished over the last month – their extreme bravery in the face of ongoing provocation and constant provocation, and the level and depth of organizing that they’ve done across the community.

Bill McKibben
It’s mostly been done with fairly abbreviated training for observers. Thirty thousand people have been trained in the course of the last month or two. That means that, in many cases, it’s only a few hours worth of that training.

Bill McKibben
But it’s been done in the right spirit, and people have emulated what they see, I think, on their YouTube feeds and things. They’ve come to understand how to behave and how to be effective.

Bill McKibben
God bless them. They’re writing a chapter of nonviolent power that’s as remarkable in its way as Gandhi’s Salt March or the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955.

Dave Chapman
You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize people to become a force together. We constantly are dealing with a world in which there’s your personal action. I’m thinking of how the term “carbon footprint” was invented. Could you tell us about that?

Bill McKibben
It was invented by some perfectly respectable and good academics out on the West Coast, but it was popularized by the British Petroleum Company in an obvious effort to make people feel that the overheating of the planet was their fault, not the oil industry’s fault.

Bill McKibben
It diverted too many people for too long from the real fight here, which is to reign in their political power so that we can actually make the progress that’s now possible.

Dave Chapman
It does seem that it’s necessary to somehow organize people. There are some things that you just can’t achieve alone.

Bill McKibben
Yes. Americans always default to the individual. It’s sort of in our national character, perhaps. But the most important thing an individual can do at this point is to be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to make things happen.

Dave Chapman
I agree, but it’s a complex balance. In agriculture, in real organic agriculture, people’s first response is to source their food from a local farm, a good farm, that they trust. I couldn’t agree more – what a wonderful way to go.

Dave Chapman
Nonetheless, even in Vermont, even at the height of summer, we’re still importing 92 percent of the food that people eat. It’s coming from someplace else. It seems somehow important that we also address that bigger system…

Bill McKibben
I have solar panels all over my roof. I’m glad they’re there. I’m glad they connect to the EV in my garage. I don’t try to fool myself that we’re going to solve this crisis in the time we have, one EV at a time, one vegan dinner at a time.

Bill McKibben
The most important work we can be doing is the work of changing the political and economic ground rules, and that requires us coming together in groups, in coalitions, and as a kind of fighting force.

Dave Chapman
The last time I talked with you five years ago, you said something that’s really resonated with me. I’ve repeated it a number of times because it really made me think. You said that when you started this work, you thought you were having a debate – a debate about the future of energy in our country – and that, in order to win the debate, you kept getting more facts. You kept looking for more facts.

Dave Chapman
It finally occurred to you that you were not having a debate; you were having a fight with money and power, and more facts weren’t going to change any of the dynamics in that.

Bill McKibben
Those of us who are writers, teachers, or things. we consider the argument all-important, want to win the argument, and you need to. The science, the economics, and the statistics are all crucial, but you can win the argument and lose the fight, because, as you say, the fight is usually about money and power.

Bill McKibben
The oil industry is a perfect example. Every scientist in the world and every policymaker outside the White House has now conceded that climate change is a deep and abiding threat. But the oil industry has been able to keep its business model ticking along because they’ve exerted enough political and economic pressure to intimidate too many leaders from acting to change.

Dave Chapman
Do you think they do that by ignoring the population? In other words, are they just going to try to get influence with politicians, or do you think they’re doing that by persuading people?

Bill McKibben
They do both. They’ve had a huge, endless disinformation campaign. Truthfully, I don’t think it’s worked that well. The polling data shows most people understand full well that we’re in trouble and why.

Bill McKibben
Ninety-four percent of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster in the last five years. At a certain point, it’s like, who are you going to believe – Fox News or your own eyes? The thing that’s much harder to overcome is their use of their cash flow to game our political system.

Bill McKibben
For years now, the network that, say, the Koch brothers set out – the Koch brothers being our biggest oil and gas barons in this country, controlling more refining and pipelining capacity than anyone else – their network became by far the biggest source of money for the Republican Party, and so the Republican Party had little choice but to adopt the idea that physics and chemistry weren’t real. This is a change.

Bill McKibben
Connecticut Republican George H. W. Bush, in 1988, running for president, said, “We will fight the greenhouse effect with the White House Effect.” It was a pretty good line and indicated his understanding that this was a very real thing.

Bill McKibben
Now we’re to the point where Donald Trump insists that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese – something that, if some guy you were sitting next to on a public bus was muttering, you’d get up and change seats. But here we are.

Dave Chapman
Can we talk a little bit about agriculture? Chemical agriculture has a pretty huge impact on climate, on our energy use, and on our use of fossil fuels. First of all, do you believe that agriculture can be transformational in terms of actually sequestering carbon, or do you believe that it would be an astonishing achievement just to become carbon-neutral?

Bill McKibben
I think that we don’t completely understand all the science around it yet, and there’s a lot of work to be done. I also think that it won’t be transformational, truthfully, over the time period that we’re talking about – the next five or ten years, which is what scientists are giving us to really change the flow of carbon into the atmosphere.

Bill McKibben
I think over that time, the most important work is the substitution of clean energy for fossil fuel. The reason that it’s both harder and easier to take on the fossil fuel industry is that there are a very small number of players here. There are 25 companies that account for more than fifty percent of the carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. They’re very big and powerful, but they’re also limited in number.

Bill McKibben
There are two billion farmers on planet Earth. That’s a big, big set of people to go about reteaching them new things. It’ll happen, but I don’t think it’ll happen super fast.

Bill McKibben
One of the things that I think is really important, hopeful, and dynamic for the agriculture industry at the moment is this advent of what we’re calling, clumsily, agrivoltaics – the growing understanding that there’s something very interesting about the land in between the rows of solar panels.

Bill McKibben
Interesting biologically, because this is land that offers shade, and it turns out that on an overheating world, there are lots of plants that are eager for that shade. But also really interesting economically, because we’re finding small farmers suddenly with a new and much more reliable income stream from growing some electrons next to their carrots.

Bill McKibben
That is offering financial stability for people who’d otherwise be driven out of farming. I think that’s one of the most promising things that we’re seeing happen.

Bill McKibben
One of the things I talk about in my most recent book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” is what’s happened in Vermont, where many, many of the solar farms have been interplanted with pollinator-friendly weeds and flowers.

Bill McKibben
They’re good for planting next to solar panels, because you really only have to mow them once a year, but they attract astonishing numbers of insects compared to a cornfield, which is a biological desert. They attract a hundred times as many pollinators, which means that the farmers in all the surrounding fields are seeing big increases in, say, fruit set in their orchards.

Bill McKibben
We’re seeing species of wasp, fly, and other insects that we thought were extirpated from New England reappearing as their host plants are suddenly reappearing. I think that there are some wonderful agricultural possibilities suddenly emerging. I think we’re being reminded of just how stupidly we use our landscape at the moment.

Bill McKibben
As you know, America’s biggest crop is corn. We grow 60 million acres of that. Thirty million acres of that is used for ethanol. Half our corn crop is just used for gasoline, and all those 30 million acres supply about three percent of America’s energy.

Bill McKibben
Now, if you took those 30 million acres – and we don’t want to do this, we don’t want to cover Iowa and Indiana stem to stern with solar panels – but if you took that 30 million acres and covered them with solar panels, you’d produce not three percent of America’s energy, but about 100 percent of the energy that we currently use.

Bill McKibben
It gives you some idea of the scale of waste in our industrial agricultural system, and the possibilities for shifting that in remarkable and benign ways.

Dave Chapman
Could you tell that story about the guy who grew and was showing an acre of corn…

Bill McKibben
It was in Illinois, in some of the richest farmland in the world. He’s a corn farmer: “Here’s an acre of corn. It’s in ethanol now; it goes to the ethanol mill. That acre, over a year, will grow enough ethanol to drive my Ford F-150 pickup – the most popular vehicle in America – about 25,000 miles.” So not nothing.

Bill McKibben
But the next acre over here, he’d converted to solar panels. He said, “The electrons that come off that field in a year will drive my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck – not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles. It only takes up half the field. I’ve got the other half, the rows in between the panels, to play with. Lots of stuff I can plant there, or, if I want, I can set my sheep to grazing there.”

Bill McKibben
The change is remarkable. I beginning to see, I think, lots and lots of especially young farmers around the country seizing these opportunities and understanding that this amounts to a very different paradigm for how you might be able to use the landscape.

Dave Chapman
One of the things that I was really struck by in “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization” is the shift for me from how do I live more responsibly to how do I be more effective on a change that is so time-sensitive?

Dave Chapman
It would be great to live more responsibly in the sense of using less energy and all of that, but on a mass scale, that’s unlikely to happen except in very desperate times – the COVID epidemics of the world.

Bill McKibben
Because I’ve written a lot about it and thought a lot about it, I think that there are deep, deep problems with our kind of growth-consumer paradigm. I think the biggest of them is that it doesn’t make us as happy as it claims to. I think 100 years from now, we will have arrived at much more interesting ways of entertaining ourselves. I think humans were built for contact with the natural world and for contact with each other.

Bill McKibben
Those are the things we’ve effectively suppressed with the battery of screens through which we now live our lives. I’m very eager for that to change, and I’ve written a lot about it and work on it. I don’t think that it’s going to change in substantial ways in the next five or ten years.

Bill McKibben
A hundred million humans enter what we call “the consuming class” now each year, most of them in Asia. I think the chance that they won’t follow us at least partway down the consumer path that we have trod over the last century is slim to none. – to reduce the stress that our way of life puts on our planet. I think we can do that in remarkable ways.

Bill McKibben
I don’t think one should undersell the magnitude of this transition. Humans have been setting things on fire for 700,000 years. That’s what the archaeologists tell us. Darwin said that language and fire were the two things that distinguished humans. But we don’t need the fire anymore.

Bill McKibben
Now we can rely on the large ball of fire that the good Lord was kind enough to hang 93 million miles up in the sky. We can catch its rays directly on solar panels, and we can take advantage of the fact that it differentially heats the earth, producing the winds that turn those majestic turbines. We’ve been given an extraordinary gift, and it would be a great sin to waste it, I think.

Dave Chapman
All right. Bill, we could obviously talk for many more hours, but I promised you we’d be in and out in forty-five minutes. I know it’s late, and you have a life to attend to. I really urge people to get a copy of “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization” and hear more of this story. You did a great job. You’re one of my very favorite writers. You’re really very good.

Bill McKibben
You’re very kind, and thank you very much for keeping on this work of yours year after year after year. It all takes a while, but it all pays off in the end. So many, many, many, many thanks, and I’ll look forward to the next time, brother.

Dave Chapman
All right. Bill McKibben, thank you very much.

Bill McKibben
Thank you.