How Bill McKibben Lost the Plot

A new book by the high priest of the climate movement reads like the end of an era

By Ted Nordhaus

The following is an excerpt of my review of Here Comes The Sun written for The New Atlantis Journal. To read the entire review, click HERE.

Some years ago, my colleagues and I used to joke that after the revolution, all essays about climate change would be written by Bill McKibben. This was during the final years of the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, when McKibben was ubiquitous in the mainstream media. In every year between 2015 and 2021, he published at least two and up to as many as six articles in the New York Times. At the same time, he was writing a regular column at the New Yorker while also publishing in virtually every leading center-left publication in the country: the New Republic, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Nation. No major legacy publication, it seemed, was exempt.

McKibben’s revolution, though, is looking tenuous these days. The tactics and rhetoric of the climate movement, and its outsized influence on the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, have sparked a terrible backlash, both among the public at large and within the Republican Party. In the face of rising energy and electricity prices, the Biden administration’s abandonment of “all of the above” energy policies, its seeming hostility to the production and use of America’s abundant oil and gas resources, and its willingness to kowtow to the climate movement helped doom Biden’s and then Harris’s election prospects.

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.

But at this dark moment for the climate movement, McKibben has good news. After decades of failed predictions, grand promises, and public subsidies, his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, heralds the arrival of a solar energy revolution. Solar, in McKibben’s telling, is now the cheapest source of energy, clean or dirty, on the planet. And it will keep getting cheaper. Backed by the full might of Chinese mercantilism, nobody — not Exxon Mobil, Donald Trump, or the vast right-wing conspiracy — can stop it.

McKibben’s solar revolution has unfurled with startling rapidity. The last two years, he argues, have marked an epochal technoeconomic shift. And yet, despite a lot of solar deployment during that period, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence of a shift in any of the key greenhouse-gas emissions metrics. The vast majority of global energy continues to be produced by fossil fuels, a fact that hasn’t much changed for decades. The Chinese “electro-state” that McKibben says represents the future doesn’t look appreciably different in this regard than the U.S. “petrostate” that he says is now trying to hold that future back. Both still depend on fossil fuels for about 80 percent of their energy consumption.

Across Here Comes the Sun’s narrative arc, what is apparent is that despite McKibben’s best efforts at optimism, the epochal shift over the last two years that actually animates the book is the return of Donald Trump. Here Comes the Sun is a rearguard action, not a victory march — an effort to sustain the climate politics that McKibben has played such a crucial role in constructing over the last generation at an existential moment for his movement.

Arguably, McKibben’s omnipresence in the world of climate journalism has been well earned. His first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989, launched climate change into public consciousness. Since then, he has written prolifically on the topic.

But McKibben has also long since ceased to be a journalist in any recognizable sense of the term. Since the early 2000s, he has held various positions, currently an endowed chair, at Middlebury College, from whence he launched the modern climate movement — including 350. org, a grassroots advocacy operation with a $20 million annual budget; campaigns against the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines; a global fossil-fuel divestment movement; and much else.

When he writes for publications like the Times, McKibben sounds like a journalist. His prose is peppered with colorful subjects and fascinating back stories. His essays overflow with citations of academic publications, news stories, and well-­credentialed experts. He is a master of the medium: modest, self-­deprecating, folksy, unfailingly polite and reasonable, part Sunday school teacher and part science educator.

But he is always also, as they say on Wall Street, talking his own book. Because he is so deeply and centrally involved in shaping the strategy, tactics, and messaging of the climate movement, when McKibben reports on climate change, he is essentially covering himself.

Consider his October 2023 New Yorker column on the Biden administration’s pending decision on whether to permit new natural gas export facilities. Titled “A Smoking Gun for Biden’s Big Climate Decision?,” the essay breathlessly related the latest study by Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, which found that because of methane leakage, liquefied natural gas exports are worse for the climate than coal, despite the fact that natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide. What McKibben didn’t tell his readers, across some 2,000 words, was that Howarth had released the study, which had yet to be peer-reviewed, at McKibben’s request, to provide him with ammunition to sway the Biden administration in his campaign to block the facilities.

What has made McKibben so influential in recent years is his unprecedented combination of roles: as movement prophet, ecovisionary, and preeminent mainstream chronicler of the “climate crisis.” But it also makes him a quintessentially unreliable narrator…

Read the full review at The New Atlantis.