Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: Author and Activist Bill McKibben Brings the Sun

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening! Wherever you are on this beautiful planet. Welcome to Sustainability in Your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

It's going to be an amazing one, because we're joined by an environmental legend. For decades, our relationship with energy has been defined by scarcity and dependency - scarcity of clean air, scarcity of affordable power, and dependency on fossil fuels that have tied economics, politics and even wars to the carbon clock that's running out.

Now, it's time for a reset, and our guest today is author and activist Bill McKibben, who's been writing about the rising environmental crisis for 40 years. His new book, Here Comes the Sun, argues that we are standing at the hinge of history. The numbers are stunning. In 2024 more than 92% of new electricity generation worldwide came from renewables, and in the United States, it was 96%. We can make a fundamental shift in how civilization powers itself if we look toward a future prosperity instead of backward and protectively on the fossil fuel era, and that's the story that Bill tells in the new book.

But of course, that transition isn't guaranteed. Even as solar and wind set record after record, political headwinds, especially here in the United States, threaten our rapid progress in renewable technology and deployments that have characterized the last decade. McKibben insists that we still have a choice whether to embrace an energy future that gets cheaper the more we use it, creating new wealth and opportunity, or we can cling to the fossil fuel economy and surrender green leadership to nations that are more willing to adapt to and respond to the climate crisis.

So Here Comes the Sun is a warning about the risks of delaying the renewables build out and locking in disastrous levels of warming. The book also invites us to imagine an economy where energy abundance reshapes daily life, reduces inequality and redefines what prosperity means.

Bill draws on decades of that frontline experience I mentioned - writing, protesting, organizing and building movements like 350.org and Third Act, a program that is bringing seniors together to make a change in the world. Bill argues that the renewables transition is not just about watts and grids, it's about democracy, justice, and whether we can finally build a society that runs on something other than an extractive industry.

Here Comes the Sun is available on Amazon, at Powell's Books and in local bookstores, and you can learn more about Bill McKibben and his work at BillMcKibben.com.

We're going to jump into the renewables powered future after a brief commercial break. Stay tuned. This is going to be a great discussion.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:10
Welcome to the show, Bill. It is an honor to have you join me today. How are you?

Bill McKibben 3:17
You know, it's a complicated question right now. The planet is in rougher shape than it's ever been. All the things that I wrote about in the 1980s in "The End of Nature" are sadly coming true. And for my money, our country's in by far the worst shape that it's been in my lifetime. It feels like our democracy is on the edge of flickering out.

And yet, there's one big good thing happening on planet Earth, and that's the story that I get to tell this year and try to turn into a challenge, both to the devastation of the climate and the devastation of our democracy. So I'm actually in a more hopeful place than I probably should be right at the moment.

Mitch Ratcliffe 4:08
I understand that strange, paradoxical feeling. It's as though everything is breaking, and therefore we might have an opportunity to rebuild everything, right?

Bill McKibben 4:17
Yeah, there's something there, and the opportunity, I think, is crystallized in these modest pieces of technology that we call solar panels. You know, this was an invention of the United States in 1954 - Bell Labs in Edison, New Jersey. You know, I'm old enough to have helped fund Bell Labs by dropping dimes in payphones at various points in my life.

And for 60-70 years, almost, this ticked along as alternative energy, you know, a nice idea existing somewhere on the fringe, on the margin, of real economies. Then sometime earlier this decade, it crossed an invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from setting coal and oil and gas on fire.

And with that moment came the possibility for truly epic kind of change - change not only in how we produce power to run our lives, but maybe even change in the other kind of power, the power that runs our lives. So it's a completely fascinating moment that begins with the reality that this stuff is now surging around the planet.

Mitch Ratcliffe 5:51
What I find confounding, having been in the room at Bell Labs where the solar panel was invented, is that we're ceding the economic opportunity that this represents.

Bill McKibben 6:04
We're - it's not that China is eating our lunch. It's that we've sent a crew of waiters wearing red caps over to Beijing to serve out the lunch for them. I mean, it's the most preposterous thing that I've ever seen - just the absolute decision that we're going to let China lead the technological future.

I mean, if Trump truly has his way for the next number of years, which I dearly hope he won't, you know, one possible outcome of all this is that 15 years from now, the US is kind of the Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion. And those foreigners who can somehow get a tourist visa come here and gawk at how things used to be back in the olden days. You know, hopefully we shake ourselves out of this and rejoin the real world sooner rather than later.

Mitch Ratcliffe 7:01
You begin Here Comes the Sun with really compelling stats that make it feel like the renewables transition is inevitable. But of course, then comes Trump, and this morning, before we're talking, Utility Scale reported that $5 billion in renewable projects were canceled in the second quarter of 2025, which trails only the first quarter 2025.

Bill McKibben 7:21
So look, the transition is inevitable. There's no way over the long run for even the rich United States to avoid the economic implications. And this transition is going full steam ahead in the rest of te world, perhaps even accelerated in certain ways by the Trump regime that we can talk about.

But, and this is key, it's not inevitable that it's going to happen in time to head off the worst of climate change. And that's the thing that really concerns me. Both here and abroad, we need to speed up the pace at which this is happening. Although it's already the fastest growing energy trend, fastest growing source of energy in history, it needs to go, scientists say, roughly 50% faster still, to get us back on the path that resembles what we laid out in Paris a decade ago.

So that's why, along with writing a book, which is one of the ways I try to make these things happen, we're also - I'm also hard at work all the time as a volunteer for this Sun Say operation that'll happen on the vernal equinox, September 21, and have events hundreds and hundreds of them all across the country, designed, among other things, I mean, designed to change local and state laws to make it easier to do solar stuff, but also just designed to once and for all drive this energy out of the alternative category in our minds, because that continues to slow down our ability to change, even our ability to see change as it happens.

Mitch Ratcliffe 9:14
Well, the "alternative" modifier is an interesting one. Of course, we have a political movement that started as the alt-right, and it has succeeded. And when I look at some of the red states out there, like Texas, that is making a lot of wealth, which makes it not alternative, but the foremost economy, do you think that our hope lies in state and local government right now, rather than federal?

Bill McKibben 9:37
Well, right now, I mean, look, we're obviously not going to get anything good out of Washington for at least the next 18 months, until we've had another election and whatever, and probably longer than that. But state and local governments can actually do a fair amount here.

It's easiest to see when you get to rooftop solar and things like that, because they're held back less by the high cost of panels, though tariffs add some to that, much more by the Byzantine permitting system. In our country, we have 15,000 municipalities. Each one has its own building code. They send out team after team of inspectors.

Contrast that with Australia or the EU. If you decide Monday morning that you want some solar on your roof, you call up your contractor, and by Friday, it's pumping out power from the top of your house. And that's a remarkable gift. We could do that, and we could do it fairly easily. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory put out this thing called the SolarAPP+ a couple of years ago. It's now been spun out as a nonprofit, and this is just an app that lets contractors type in the kind of equipment they're putting on a roof, and where the roof is, what it connects to, and if it all checks out, they get, instantaneously, a permit. California, Maryland and now New Jersey have mandated its use, and we should be doing this all across the country.

There are even more remarkable examples for me. You may know that across Europe, over the last three years, there's just been an explosion in what we're calling balcony solar. You know, you go to your local, whatever you call the Best Buy, in Brussels or wherever, and plunk down a few hundred euros and come home with a solar panel designed to be not put on the roof, but hung from the railing of your balcony because you're an apartment dweller, and you just plug it into a completely normal plug. That's it. No electricians, no new wiring, no anything. It's often producing 20-25% of the electricity an apartment is using.

That's illegal everywhere in this country, except in that progressive bastion, the state of Utah, where the state legislature earlier this year passed unanimously enabling legislation. One state senator who I've talked to, a Republican, stood up and said, you know, if this is good enough for the people of Stuttgart, why should it be denied the people of Provo? And nobody could come up with a good reason. And so now you can go on YouTube and watch lots of videos of earnest Utahns putting up their balcony solar.

That kind of thing we can make happen around the country. Now this doesn't address all the issues that we have, by any means, and it's incredibly stupid to have our federal government working against all this. I mean, last week, the federal government issued a stop work order for a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that was 90% complete. Now it's just going to sit there in the ocean forever as a monument to our almost unbelievable levels of corruption and stupidity.

But we can do what we can do at the state and local level, and that's quite a bit. So Sun Day is a good place to start. People can go to Sunday.Earth to find out as much as they can.

Mitch Ratcliffe 13:42
One of the other challenges that we have is the structure of the utilities industry in the United States. How would you change the configuration of our grid - the legal configuration of our grid - to ensure that the low cost energy vision can be realized?

Bill McKibben 13:57
Well, we have to do what has happened in many other parts of the world, which is really prioritize low cost production on the grid, and turn to that first. And the places that have done some of this are showing extraordinary results.

You know, California now reached some kind of tipping point in the last year or so. California now produces more than 100% of the power it uses from renewable energy for long stretches of every day. At night, the biggest source of supply to the grid are batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. They didn't even exist three years ago in California, and this is the statistic, more than any other, that kind of makes me hopeful: California this summer is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago, and California is the fourth largest economy in the world. So not a trivial example.

Texas is now putting up more of this stuff than California. Texas has its own utility grid, its own electric grid, and in Texas, if you build a solar farm, in essence, they have to connect you to the grid right away. They have to - it's called managed connection. The utility has to - they can't just slow-walk you forever, which is what happens in much of the country, and making that happen is essential, place after place after place.

So there's a lot that we can do with utilities to bring them into the 21st century. They're going to, in many cases, be brought in kicking and screaming because they like the current, highly centralized "we control everything" model, but technology is going to break that down one way or another. If utilities just charge ever higher prices, the point will eventually reach where many, many people will just choose to disconnect from the grid and have their own set of solar panels and their own battery, or entire neighborhoods will choose to island themselves in micro grids.

And so utilities, the clever ones, are doing all kinds of interesting things. Here in Vermont, where I live, the biggest power plant in the state of Vermont is the virtual power plant composed of thousands of batteries that Green Mountain Power helped pay to put in people's basements, and they can use those connected batteries to supply power to the larger grid at moments of peak demand, saving them lots of money and lots of trauma. So things like that are real possibilities.

Mitch Ratcliffe 16:54
You describe in great detail the fact that after the initial capital expense of installing this capacity, both the storage and generation capacity, basically the power is free after that. Can you talk about where we are on the cost curve and explain to folks how renewables can become virtually free in perpetuity?

Bill McKibben 17:13
I mean, this is the great conceptual change here. We're very used to the idea of energy as commodity, as something that you go drill for or mine and then store in reserves and dole out to people who pay you a check every month, or whatever. Renewable energy, energy from the sun, is different. Once you've paid to put up the solar panels, then the sun pleasantly delivers the energy for free over and over and over and over again.

And this is why - this is the answer to the question that I may get more than almost any other: Why don't Exxon and Chevron decide to become renewable energy companies? And the reason they don't is because you cannot make as much money with that model as you can. The head of Exxon said last year, "We're never going to invest in renewable energy because it doesn't offer, quote, above-average returns for our investors," and he's right, it doesn't.

It provides much cheaper energy to everyone now over, you know, for your own house or for your national economy - that is a great thing. Your bills are smaller. You can produce more with less spending for energy, but it's terrible news if you own an oil well or a coal mine. And because that pain is concentrated on those people who own those things, they have a great incentive to game our political system in their favor.

You'll recall that last year, running for office, candidate Trump told oil executives, "Give me a billion dollars and I'll let you do anything you want." They gave him about half a billion, and that turned out to be enough, because they're getting everything that they've asked for. So we need to have as much commitment to advancing clean energy as they do to bolstering dirty energy. That's why we organize.

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:30
This is a great place to take a quick break. We'll be right back, folks, to continue this discussion.

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:40
Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear, and we're going to continue the conversation with author Bill McKibben about his new book Here Comes the Sun. It is about the fact that once you put a renewable infrastructure in place, it pretty much gives you free energy, something that changes the world and the dynamics of the world.

Bill, we've been defined by oil now for 10 years. So we're locked in wars and conflicts in the Middle East, and have been for decades as a result of our dependence on oil. Does the politics of abundance that you're talking about, and that's key to realizing all these benefits of the renewables transition - does that story even lie on the left-right spectrum, or do we need to rethink our politics and what we disagree about, as well as what we might begin to agree about?

Bill McKibben 20:24
I think it's a very good way of putting it. And first of all, I'm very grateful for you making that point about our geopolitics. It is fascinating to, in your mind, ask yourself the question: What would the global politics of the last 70 years have looked like in a world where oil was of trivial value? How would we have - what would have happened differently? And the answer is a lot. A lot fewer wars and coups and assassination attempts and terrorist plots and on and on and on. Even humans are going to be hard pressed to figure out how to start a war over sunshine.

In our context, here in the States, the politics are interesting too. In terms of partisan politics, it's true that the oil industry essentially purchased the Republican Party. You know, a few decades ago, the biggest donors to the Republican Party have been the Koch brothers, who are also our biggest oil and gas barons. And so it became - you had to be a Republican in good standing, you had to spout nonsense like "global warming doesn't exist, it's a hoax invented by the Chinese," whatever.

But that's party politics is different from how people of different tendencies actually think. And here, I think the news is much better. Polling shows that both conservatives and liberals really like solar energy, but they like it, I think, for slightly different reasons. Now I've lived deep in rural America my whole life, sometimes in red states and sometimes in purplish ones, and so I have lots of conservative, Trump-loving neighbors, and many of them have solar panels on their roofs because - not because of climate change, because they're very firm believers in the idea that "my house is my castle, which I'm going to defend with my AR-15, but also which becomes more of my castle if it has its own independent energy supply, and I don't have to rely on the utilities who, like all Americans, I kind of hate anyway." That's how one can work with that kind of political difference.

You know, I mean, my liberal neighbors like solar power because of the groovy power of the sun. It's different, but it's not impossibly different.

Mitch Ratcliffe 23:05
I've never met a red-stater who, once they figured out they could make money from a renewable activity regardless of what it was, including composting, has objected to green politics. They don't like the liberal component of it, but they recognize the utility.

Bill McKibben 23:21
What's interesting is to watch, say, these fights over solar farms in various places, and it's often the local farmer who wants to do it, and there's often the opposition is coming, in many cases, from recently arrived retirees who don't want to look at solar panels. And that's a - I got to say, that part of it drives me nuts.

The tribe that I would like to speak to is my own tribe, you know, educated, relatively affluent, older white guys who are really good at suing to stop things that they don't want to have interfere with their world in any way. We should stop suing to stop solar farms and wind turbines and understand that they are an asset in so many ways. For many rural communities, this is the best way to pay property taxes and things in a tough economic time that there ever was. That's why the Texas legislature this year turned down serious attempts to slow the sun and wind business. So many rural people showed up to say, "Look, this is what supports our school system."

So I think that land use thing is a big deal, and we should address it more directly than we do. I've been really firm about saying clean electrons are a valuable crop that we should be raising on some percentage of our agricultural land in this country, not all of it. Mark Jacobson at Stanford says we'll need to cover somewhere around a percent and a half of the country with solar panels or wind turbines, which is probably less land than we're using for fossil fuel now.

But the possibilities are amazing. I was in a cornfield in Illinois last summer reporting this book, and there was a farmer who was converting some of his land into solar arrays from corn, which is the biggest crop in our country. Half the corn, including much of his land, was used for corn that becomes ethanol. We're just growing gasoline on 30 million acres, but growing it inefficiently. He said, "Look at this field of corn. This acre, over a year, will produce enough ethanol to drive my Ford F-150 pickup about 25,000 miles." Then he turned and said, "This acre that I'm converting to solar panels will produce enough electrons in a year to drive my Ford F-150 Lightning, the EV version of the same truck, not 25,000 miles, but 700,000 miles."

And to make that happen, you do not need any longer to pour large quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus on your field, which you need to do to make the corn grow. That stuff washes down to the Gulf of Mexico and creates the dead zone. You don't need to strafe it with pesticides and herbicides. In fact, you've got half the field left - the land in between the rows of the panels - to do all kinds of stuff with. That's what we're now calling agrivoltaics, and it's one of the fastest growing parts of agriculture in the world. Because you're creating a new valuable commodity. On an overheated world, shade is a useful thing, and so for one crop after another, people are discovering that.

I just saw trials from France - vineyards where the yield for several grape varieties was up 60% when they were grown in conjunction with solar panels. So our notion of what constitutes the proper landscape needs to be adjusted some in light of the realities in which we're enmeshed.

Mitch Ratcliffe 27:34
Thinking about your various activist undertakings, and the fact that you mentioned this a moment ago that older people who are moving to the wilderness-urban interface, or to the rural communities - generally, about 75% of the new arrivals are old guys like us. You founded 350.org to focus on carbon. But then you also founded Third Act. How do you envision using Third Act to bring not just that awareness to seniors about the utility of not objecting to a wind farm because of all the good it does, but also to engage in this intergenerational change?

Bill McKibben 28:13
Oh, absolutely. So Third Act's been, if I say so myself, a rollicking success. We started about three years ago, and now we've got about 100,000 people across the country over the age of 60, big working groups in most states that have become real political powers, because it turns out that older people have not only skills and connections built up over a lifetime, but they have a lot of hours in the week that they can spend doing important work.

And so they work on lots of things. I mean, this was the genesis of Sun Day. There are now many, many, many other groups involved, but they also do things like bird-dog the public utility commissions in state after state. These are crucial bureaucracies, but they've been protected for decades by a force field of their own boringness. You know, who wants to spend all Tuesday and Wednesday in some anonymous state office building listening to these committees? The only people who want to are lobbyists for the utilities. So they've captured all these things, and instead, now we've got teams of people who will go and be there all day. They might take their knitting with them or a crossword puzzle book, but they're there to witness, to testify, to spread the word, and they're making a big difference.

One of the things that we insist on at Third Act is that we're acting in support of young people every place that we can. And my sense from doing that work is that young people - you know, we talk a lot about climate anxiety and climate despair among the young and things - my strong sense is it's linked. It's less to the actual progress of climate change than it is to the sense that they've been abandoned to deal with it by themselves, and that we've taken the cream off the top and are just like, "You guys, figure out how to handle all the rest of this."

The sense of relief, pleasure and camaraderie when a bunch of old people appear to help out is fantastic. I remember being at the first big demonstration that we did, which was in Boston, outside the banks that are financing the fossil fuel industry. And we'd been asked by Fridays for the Future, the local offshoot of Greta's movement, to take part, because they said, "We don't even have checking accounts, credit cards, you know, they won't listen to us."

So I got to the demonstration, and there were 3-400 high school kids there. There are always a bunch of high school kids, because they know the barrel of the gun down which they're staring. But at the back - and they're sprier, so they were at the head of the march, but at the back of the march, there were 3-400 of us from this nascent Third Act with a big banner that said, "Fossils Against Fossil Fuels." And I can just remember the kids all laughing, and then high-fiving everybody, and like, "Thank you. This is good. Let's work together."

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:27
Yeah, all we need to do is pull together, and you point out that wall of boredom that prevents a lot of activity. Of course, the right did that and started 30 years ago. How long do you think it takes for us to make the turn back toward the progress that we were making?

Bill McKibben 31:44
So I think that the thing that's helpful here is that now for the first time in the climate fight, economic gravity is pulling our direction. You know, for the first 35 years of the climate battle, we lived in a world marked by cheap fossil fuel and expensive renewable energy, and so all our efforts basically had to be on the difficult task of making fossil fuel more expensive - carbon taxes, divestment, to raise the cost of capital, fighting their expansion plans to make them more expensive and difficult.

Now that shoe is on the other foot, and they have to figure out how to obstruct the workings of a world in which renewable energy is not just cheap, but gets cheaper all the time, every passing quarter. So I have some hope that we can - it won't take us 30 years, but I also have great fear that it will take us longer than physics and chemistry are allowing us. I am always aware of just how fast climate change is now developing, and I know more climate science than I should for my peace of mind.

You know the signals in the last couple of years from the biggest systems on the planet, the jet stream, the Gulf Stream - these terrify me. Clearly, they're beginning to flicker and falter, and in very much real time, we've got a matter of a few years to try and start taking some of the pressure off the planet's climate system.

Mitch Ratcliffe 33:31
You've been writing about this now for 40 years, and you must have thought a lot about how much things have changed, not just on the climate side, but in terms of the society that you are speaking to. Looking back from, say, 2100 and assuming that we do make the turn successfully, what do you think people will say about the decisions that we're making today?

Bill McKibben 33:49
Well, I think that they will understand that this proved to be one way or another the crucial question - like this was the set of decisions that not only determined how high the temperature got, but determined sort of whether we were able to hold on to our democracy and in fact, make it much stronger because it became more in the hands of our local communities and so on.

So I think we're at a very, very tenuous but also very potentially promising moment right now, and I am just fascinated to see how it ends up, and completely committed to try and steer it as hard as I can in the direction of sanity. That's why, I mean, I'm glad that I'm publishing the book right now, because "Here Comes the Sun" gives me the chance to talk about the thing I really want to talk about, which is this Sun Day day of action that's coming up in September. Because it's things like that that will determine whether or not we make this turn in time.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:04
In addition to going out and participating in Sun Day, what are a couple of the ideas that you wish everybody who reads Here Comes the Sun will take away and begin to act on?

Bill McKibben 35:13
Well, I think that the lowest hanging fruit is this stuff about making it much easier to put this stuff on your own home and put community solar and things like that. I think that I want people to really understand that the rest of the world is busily doing this, and so they have lots of models to choose from about how to make it easier for your utility sector or whatever to do it.

But I think most of all just this notion that this is no longer alternative. The analogy I've been using is we've thought of it for a long time as the Whole Foods of energy, you know, nice, but pricey. It's the Costco of energy. It's cheap, it's available in bulk. It's on the shelf now, ready to go. I think if that sunk in, all the politics would get a lot easier.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:13
Should we have a campaign to get apartment level balcony solar easily accepted anywhere in the United States? It sounds to me like a really, potentially...

Bill McKibben 36:23
Absolutely, and it's one of the things that Sun Day is primed to do, and we've got model legislation and so on to make it easier for people to do just that place after place after place.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:37
Well, Bill, I hope that turns out well, and thank you so much for the book and for the time today. We really appreciate your insights.

Bill McKibben 36:46
Well, I really appreciate the chance to talk with you and enjoy the gorgeous forests of Oregon. It's nice to think of you there among all that tall timber.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:06
Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. You've been listening to my conversation with legendary environmentalist and author Bill McKibben. His new book, Here Comes the Sun, is a call for not just a climate response built on renewable energy, but also a common sense, locally oriented approach to energy policy. As a founder of the climate awareness group 350.org and Third Act, which activates senior citizens to join the intergenerational campaign of environmental common sense, he's also one of the most prolific activists of our time.On September 21st, Bill will launch Sun Day - a celebration of a cleaner, more prosperous future.

Here Comes the Sun is available on Amazon, at Powell's Books, and in local bookstores.

Despite their successes generating energy from the sun, solar and wind power are being forced back into the alternative category from which they have emerged to deliver the least expensive power in human history. That's happening because of the immensely well-funded campaign by the fossil fuels industry.

We're told every day that drilling is the path to cheap energy, that wind farms kill whales and that solar installations are ugly by politicians who, as Bill said correctly, have been bought by the industry most responsible for the environmental crisis that has devastated biodiversity, expanded droughts and brought weather in terrifying extremes, while fostering the worst political divisions in our country's history.

It's time to stop pretending solar energy is an alternative and embrace it as our future path. In order to do that, we also need to heal our politics, and I think that starts by firmly holding governments to the commitment for lower energy prices. Gas prices may be a few cents lower than last Labor Day, but renewables have fallen in cost by 90% since 2015. Yet, because coal and gas continue to power much of the nation, electricity prices overall are up across the country and continue to rise. They were up 2% in the last year, adjusted for inflation. But of course, energy is the basis of inflation, so it is just going up.

Keeping our focus forward looking, we can see where solar and wind have a proven price advantage and more gains in productivity with lower prices yet to come, and that power comes without the immense carbon footprint our oily lifestyles produce. Bill and the Sun D ay community have teed up the renewables dialog for another round. So visit Sunday.Earth to start your own event and add it to the National Map of Sun Day actions for September 21, 2025. If you don't have the ability to host an event, find one to attend near you. There are events in nearly every state.

Sun Day 2025 is just the first and unless we're truly entered into a tyranny, it will not be the last. Now is not the time to head backwards, to get lost in and retreat into fantasies of a better time when we have so little time to prevent the worst of the already self-evident consequences of climate change. Seriously, folks, do you think the 1950s and with them, segregation, polio economics, dirty, smoggy cities, asbestos in homes and classrooms and so many other retrograde changes being urged on us by the administration were better, worth going back to? If your answer is no, Sun Day is the dawn of a new movement that can lead to the change that turns renewables into the mainstream source of power that it is becoming around the world.

And Bill's comment that the rest of the world is busy transforming their economies and capturing global leadership in a technology that the United States invented takes dead aim at the real choice we have: to retreat after 100 years of being first, best and most prosperous due to our innovation, or to sit back and think that somehow we're going to take care of all our needs ourselves.

Make Sun Day, September 21st - which is Sunday - Renewables Liberation Day. Let's put solar and wind at the top of the agenda, where they belong. And I hope you'll take a moment to review the more than 500 episodes of Sustainability in Your Ear that we have produced. Share it with your friends, your family, your coworkers, and writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us, folks. You're the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste.

Tell your friends that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. In fact, tell your enemies. Tell everybody. Let's get this conversation going and going strong. Thank you for your support.

I'm Mitch Ratcliffe, this is Sustainability in Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself. Take care of one another, and please, let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day!