An article by
Ted Nordhaus in the New Atlantis reviews Bill McKibben’s new book praising the
salvific nature of solar power, and opines about how the climate movement is
changing. I have read a few of Bill McKibben’s books and quite a few of his
articles. He relentlessly bashes fossil fuels as the cause of all the world’s
problems and highlights dangerous, absurd solutions like banning fossil fuels,
degrowth, socialism, and massive solar and wind deployment. His latest book
apparently attempts to be more optimistic than he usually is as a leading
catastrophist.
Nordhaus first notes
McKibben’s popularity and influence in the late 2010s, when he wrote articles
for many left and center-left media outlets like the New York Times, the New
Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, Washington Post, and the Nation. He
then correctly notes that the influence of the climate movement on the Biden
administration and on the Democratic Party as a whole has been disastrous, with
backlash to it leading to political losses. I agree. I think I remember in the
2016 Democratic National Convention when Bernie Sanders used his influence to
invite people to draft the party platform. McKibben was one of those people,
which rather pissed me off at the time, since I see him as an environmental or
climate extremist whose views the party should not seek to advance. Now, they
are using those same activist tools to dismantle Biden’s climate legacy. He
writes:
“The price of hitching the climate movement and the
clean energy future wholly to Biden and the Democratic Party has also been
steep. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress are not only in the
process of laying waste to the Biden-era climate and energy agenda but have now
turned the very same tools that environmentalists and Democrats long used to
try to regulate fossil energy out of existence — NIMBYism, targeted taxes,
permitting — against renewables, likely to far greater effect.”
McKibben’s new book, ‘Here
Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for
Civilization,’ apparently heralds a new solar energy revolution, one that
is not likely to manifest the way McKibben sees it, as is often the case. While
McKibben attempts to give his solar assessment as an optimistic manifesto,
Nordhaus instead sees it as an effort to prop up his faltering climate
movement. He also notes McKibben’s involvement in requesting Cornell Professor
Robert Howarth to release his (not widely seen as credible) data on the methane
emissions of LNG exports before peer review in order to influence the Biden
administration’s decision to pause LNG exports pending further review. McKibben
helped by writing about it. I was unaware of this. He writes about Howarth’s
strong credentials, while Howarth’s fellow scientists mostly distrust his
results, which are rooted firmly in the minority. Apparently, McKibben brags on
and on about the new solar ‘capacity’ being added, while we should all know
that that is a bad way to compare, since capacity does not reflect utilization
and rates of generation. Nordhaus notes:
“These claims are factual but not factful, to use the
late Swedish epidemiologist Hans Rosling’s memorable distinction between
statistics that are used for illumination and those that are used for support.”
This sounds very much like geologist Scott Tinker’s saying
that one can be completely factual without being factually complete. Nordhaus
also goes through some of solar’s other challenges and limitations, including
curtailment during periods of overgeneration. This is an issue wherever solar
penetration on grids is high. That overgeneration must be lost, exported to
other places (often at a loss), or stored in batteries or some other form of
energy storage. The storage option is prohibitively expensive. I think the fact
that McKibben is still spouting old-school solar hype and reliance on the same
activist scientists shows clearly that the movement is sputtering out. Nordhaus
asks if solar is the cheapest form of energy and ready for prime time, as
McKibben suggests, then why fight for subsidizing it and protest in favor of
it, as he advocates? McKibben apparently thinks it is fossil fuel interests,
right-wing ideologues, self-interested utilities, and NIMBYs that are holding
back a solar revolution. The reality is, of course, that solar and wind are
ultimately not that cheap, and subsidies are needed for most projects, as are
backup sources of typically natural gas power. McKibben also apparently cites
the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) in stating that solar is cheap. It is
well-known that the LCOE estimates often leave out significant required costs.
I once proposed a metric for grid integration costs known as the levelized cost
of grid integration (LCOGI) to account for those costs. The cost of curtailment
and some other issues must also be accounted for in metrics that measure the
whole picture. The LCOE argument is another well-used example of common
renewable energy hype. Nordhaus notes:
“…wind and solar can cost 50 to 100 percent more once the
costs of their intermittency, which is imposed upon grid operators and
ultimately end users, is accounted for.”
McKibben praises the
“electrify everything” mantra, noting correctly that electric power can be more
efficient than fossil fuel power. However, Nordhaus notes that electrification
has limitations, particularly in heavy industries or in industries where fossil
fuels are used chemically as well as for power, such as the steel industry that
combines carbon from coal with iron ore or the fertilizer industry, which uses
natural gas as a necessary feedstock. While EVs and heat pumps have their
merits, they have some disadvantages as well. In time, however, they may come
to dominate as their technology, efficiency, and cost improve. McKibben tries
to simplify the argument to say moving electrons is good but burning things is
bad, without acknowledging that burning things still results in well over 80%
of our energy.
Apparently, McKibben also
writes about and venerates Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson as a
victim of the corrupt establishment. Jacobson has long-established himself as
an activist-scientist, of which there are not that many. Jacobson sued when a
group of 20 authors wrote a PNAS paper refuting his assertions about running
our entire energy system on renewables. He lost the lawsuit (and the whole
argument IMO). Many of these arguments have long been debunked. Nordhaus
writes:
“But excepting the final chapter, where McKibben turns
mystical about the sun, it is not at all clear that querying ChatGPT to write a
Bill McKibben book about solar energy would have produced anything
substantively different. Virtually every argument in the book has been well
rehearsed by McKibben and many others over the last decade or so, and some for
far longer.”
Nordhaus sees McKibben’s book
as an exhortation for his followers to ‘keep the faith.’ Especially those who
follow him from the center-left, many of whom are jumping ship, which I think
is long overdue. He suggests that Biden overspent on the IRA, some of which is
being stripped away, fairly or unfairly, by Trump. At the least, Biden
overinvested in policies that bowed down to the climate movement. He says that
is changing now with the abundance movement and other factions rising.
“While McKibben was proselytizing a World War II–style
mobilization to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines in the United
States, the global energy transition was being built upon authoritarian Chinese
state capitalism’s production of photovoltaic cells, underwritten by federal
tax credits and driven forward by blue-state deployment mandates. As the costs
of those policies have come home to roost, even California’s progressive
Democratic leadership has reversed course, first on nuclear energy and then on
the state’s draconian clean fuels mandates. At the federal level, national
Democrats have signaled that, despite their distaste for Trump’s anti-renewable
and energy-dominance agenda, they are ready to work with Congressional
Republicans on far-reaching federal permitting reform.”
“Perhaps most of all, the rise of Trump and the populist
right exposed just how deeply disconnected contemporary environmentalism and
the climate movement had become from public sentiment.”
In his final analysis,
Nordhaus sees McKibben’s book as heralding not a new solar age, but as a eulogy
to the end of a climate era where his ideas were king. I say, “Good riddance!”
References:
How
Bill McKibben Lost the Plot: A new book by the high priest of the climate
movement reads like the end of an era. Ted Nordhaus. The New Atlantis. August
21, 2025. How
Bill McKibben Lost the Plot — The New Atlantis
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