Our last, best chance to cool the Earth | Bill McKibben

**Elise Hu** (0:03)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Most of what we hear about climate change is worrying and often bleak. But every once in a while, some good news comes along. And when it comes to energy, this could be one of the more hopeful moments in human history.
Author, educator, and activist Bill McKibben has been thinking about climate change for decades. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, is widely considered the first book on climate change written for a general audience. I have been reading his work for years and for most of that time, the news and Bill's writing has been pretty grim. Our fight to save the planet is an uphill one. So it means something that today Bill's hopeful, and that hope rests on a single, almost deceptively simple fact.

**Bill McKibben** (0:57)
Earlier this decade, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun than from burning coal and gas and oil. Let me repeat, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

**Elise Hu** (1:16)
In his talk, Bill argues that solar and wind are no longer the expensive, idealistic alternative. They're simply the best and cheapest way to make power. He thinks we've been slow to notice the scale of this shift, in part because of the words we use to categorize it as alternative energy.
He shows why solar power is our last best chance to cool the earth if we're willing to reach for it. And stick around after the talk, I got to sit down with Bill to go beyond the ideas he shared on stage, including why he thinks solar power is a form of solidarity, why he thinks recent wars have actually sped up the clean energy shift, and what he tells people who ask where they should move to stay safe from climate change.

**Bill McKibben** (1:57)
The place that you want to be is the place with good neighbors. Neighbors have been optional for the last 100 years in the Western world, but they're not going to be optional for the next 100 years.

**Elise Hu** (2:09)
And just a quick note before we jump in, when I sat down with Bill in April after his talk, only Utah, Virginia, and Maine had passed plug-in solar legislation, which is mentioned in his talk and conversation. But since then, Vermont, Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, and New Hampshire have signed similar legislation into law. New York and New Jersey have passed legislation that are currently waiting on signatures from their governors. His talk and our conversation are coming up after a short break.
And now our TED Talk and conversation of the day.

**Bill McKibben** (2:54)
The Earth is producing about a third more power from the sun this spring than last. That solar power is suddenly so cheap and abundant that Australians will soon get three hours of electricity free every afternoon. Free! After 400,000 years of working hard for energy, from gathering firewood to paying the power bill, some humans will suddenly have access to this commodity for nothing. California, fourth largest economy in the world, now produces most days more than 100% of its electricity from renewable energy at night, when the sun goes down. Big new batteries on the grid turn dark into daylight. In Pakistan, peasant farmers who used to pay through the nose for diesel power to run their irrigation pumps are using 30% less of the fuel than they were two years ago, in large part because they've imported millions of cheap Chinese solar panels and gone on YouTube to figure out how to connect them up. They often lack the money to build the steel scaffolding we're used to seeing at solar farms. No matter, they just lay them on the ground and point them at the sun.
In a world where many, many big things have taken a very dark turn this decade, this is the one big thing that is going right. We have quite suddenly the opportunity to build a clean, abundant future if we simply seize it. But most of us don't recognize how huge this moment is. In part, that's because we've spent decades calling this stuff alternative energy. And it's blinded us to the fact that it's now the obvious, common sense, straightforward way to power the future.
Roughly 90% of new electric generation around the world last year came from the sun and the wind. And that, in turn, is because earlier this decade, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun than from burning coal and gas and oil. Let me repeat, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.