Review of Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun

By John Bradley

Bill McKibben is an American environmental writer, journalist and organizer. In 1989 he published his first book, The End of Nature, which elaborated on global warming and climate change and became an environmental classic. His latest book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization is a timely report card analyzing the global effort to slow and then reverse global warming and its increasingly devastating effects.  He documents the worldwide transition to renewable energy powered directly by the sun’s energy - wind and solar - as opposed to burning fossil fuels, our industrial era legacy. From his extensive travel, research and teaching, he brings to life how people experience this energy transformation and live with the effects of climate change. He shows how these trends are playing out in Asia, Africa and the developed world.     

In contrast to this encouraging transformation in energy use, he also describes the relentless dynamics of industrial era energy industries that perpetuate the warming trends and cast doubt on whether the global community can avert warming’s worst outcomes. His writing nicely presents the granular picture of the economics and ecology of these opposing forces in people's lives currently and in their likely future. For those of us discouraged by the US’s federal policy opposing renewable energy, McKibben offers important notes of optimism and succinctly identifies the urgent challenges ahead.

In Section One of the book, McKibben describes the dramatic drop in the cost of solar energy over the last few decades due mostly to huge investments in China, and he unpacks the underlying economic forces vying to shape the outcome of climate change:

1. The dramatic drop in the cost of renewable energy globally was driven largely by China's massive investment in the supply chain for solar energy and its manufacturing dominance in clean technologies - solar panels, Electric Vehicles (EVs), storage batteries, and more.

2. China’s overproduction of solar panels lowered the cost of electricity production and flooded world markets with high quality cheap solar panels. As a result, solar and wind became the most cost effective energy investments globally. McKibben’s description of the local impact in many countries is encouraging. The availability of inexpensive local electricity generation boosts local economies, freeing them at least temporarily of the need for large capital investments. 

3. The same dynamic also changes the basic relationship of energy investment and development. In the fossil fuel (Industrial) age, profits depended on continuous sales of fuel (gas, oil, coal) to power everything. In the Renewable Age, an investment in direct energy from the sun eliminates these ongoing fuel costs, thus freeing cash to support more productive activities, such as education, small business, etc. McKibben compares this development to the onset of cell phones which eliminated the need for large investments in regional phone systems and boosted local productivity.

4. Lower cost renewable energy expands opportunities for economic development and also reduces harmful pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and other waste. 

5. One huge economic factor has not changed - the inequity between the developed and developing world. In the last few chapters he discusses this geopolitical issue and the need for capital to accelerate the positive trends of energy transformation. His take is not optimistic.

McKibben masterfully describes the details of these trends, especially for small scale farmers who have to scrape by. For example, desperate drought stricken Pakistani farmers often cannot afford the metal mountings for solar panels so the panels are just laid on the ground next to the irrigating pumps. Over six months in 2024, Pakistanis working on their own, without government guidance, installed the equivalent of 30% of the nation’s electric grid, thanks to Chinese overproduction and low market price of solar panels.

McKibben portrays the present situation as a contest between the clean energy economics and progressive environmental politics on the one hand and the entrenched investment and political strength of the fossil fuel industries on the other. His optimism about the emerging dominance of energy directly from the sun is tempered by the resistance to transformative economic change, the failure of the community of nations to meet the targets of the Paris Accords, and perhaps more challengingly by the complexity of the natural processes of climate change.

A critical determinant is nature herself. Climate stability depends on the health of interconnected ecosystems and related carbon, water, energy and other natural cycles. Ecosystems that have evolved over millennia have been degraded by agriculture and urbanization in recent centuries and have lost their resilience to sustain the climate. As a result, some aspects of climate change dynamics are self-perpetuating and serve to accelerate the warming process. 

The basics of warming are straightforward. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) including carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane and water vapor, hold heat, warming the atmosphere. When the sun’s radiation strikes the earth’s surface, one of three things happen: the radiation is reflected back out by surfaces such as snow or ice; it is absorbed by vegetation and marine life for photosynthesis; or it is absorbed by the earth’s surface which warms the air.  Vegetation’s photosynthesis cools the air, returns moisture to the atmosphere (precipitation recycling) and sequesters CO₂. Everyone has experienced both the coolness in a forest and the heat of an urban parking lot. The vast areas of the earth’s surface that have been deforested (such as bare fields, cities, and industrial sites) disrupt nature and add heat to the atmosphere. 

As GHG emissions increase, the atmosphere and oceans warm, storms are able to hold more water and then dump devastating rains. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 5’ of rain on Texas. McKibben details this devastating flooding on all continents and the continuous record resetting heat over the past few decades.  Warming also causes more and longer droughts and more wildfires. Wildfires release CO₂, which contributes to more warming.  This vicious cycle is a positive feedback loop which accelerates warming. In recent decades, wildfires have increased GHGs by 60% globally. The present raging wildfires in Patagonia are due to willful shortsightedness. Plantations of highly combustible species of non-native pine trees cover the region and wildfires once started turn out to be impossible to stop .

One of the most consequential self-accelerating feedback loops is in the polar regions. Warming reduces snow and ice cap, exposes non reflective land mass and thaws permafrost. Over a recent 20-year period, more CO₂ was released than the tundra could sequester. This increases warming, continuing the vicious loop. Warming in the polar regions emits CO₂ at four times the rate as in other latitudes and will have an unpredictable impact on ocean currents. Throughout the book, McKibben details the impacts of these processes on people's lives across the globe. In the last two thirds of the book, he details these devastating effects and argues that the world is not only failing to meet the Paris Accord targets to limit warming to 2℃ but may be unable to move fast enough to reign in the runaway warming processes.

As I write this review in late January 2026, leading earth science research institutes are releasing reports summarizing 2025. Yale Environment 360 just published an analysis  Overshoot: The World is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate which documents multiple areas of accelerating climate change - ‘irreversible planetary tipping points’.  Some land-based carbon sinks have been so weakened that parts of the arctic tundra and some African rainforests have turned from long-term carbon sinks to sources - emitting more CO₂ than they sequester. Parts of the Amazon are degraded to this point also. Scientists express the concern that what has been a gradual increase in warming will turn to more rapid acceleration when tipping points are passed. The Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research commented that ‘Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end’.   McKibben documents these processes and argues that our opportunity now may be our last chance to avert the worst.

My take on Here Comes the Sun is that it was a valuable read, packed with information on what is happening with climate change and energy transformation on all continents. McKibben explains the options for averting the worst disasters of climate change and our limited timeframe. 

As someone who likes footnotes, I felt shortchanged that the book has no footnotes. In his acknowledgement he identifies news sources that excel in climate coverage and on which he relies. He notes The Economist, The Guardian, The Financial Times and Bloomberg News as well as a list of podcasters, researchers and other authors.  These are invaluable sources but in my view, there is nothing like good footnotes.

My footnotes:       

Fred Pearce, Overshoot: The World is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate,Yale Environment 360,  Jan 29, 2026 , https://e360.yale.edu/

Maxi Jonas, The land will be left as ashes: Why Patagonias wildfires are almost impossible to stop,  The Guardian, Jan 27, 2026,        https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/argentina-patagonia-wildfires-javier-milei-mapuche-conspiracy-theories-cuts-climate-crisis-extreme-weather