> Here Comes the Sun argues that the economics of cheap, abundant clean energy make the energy transition nearly inevitable. Unfortunately, as McKibben points out, there’s a powerful political drag on that transition: “The fossil fuel industry is fighting hard because it understands the math.”
'The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world’s energy companies and major fossil fuel–producing countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is in the ground that we can, with present technology, extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is… 2,795 gigatons. Which means the total amount of known, proven extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is almost *five times* the amount we can safely burn.
'Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate movement is to find a way to force the powers that be, from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into your stocks? You can’t have it.
'Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.
'The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.'
[Standard, obvious disclaimer that this is about political economics, not trying to draw some kind of moral equivalence between human enslavement and burning fossils.]
'More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.'
I am reviewing research journals concerning Building Integrated Photovoltaic Arrays (BIPV) in areas that experience Wildland fires in Urban areas. That is a big threat in the San Antonio/ Austin area. We do a lot of solar in Austin. We have building code requirements that requires dedicating the area of roofs on large buildings for PV arrays. We're seeing more projects where LiB (lithium ion battery) are being integrated.
All materials/structures that can store a large amount of energy in a small volume are going to be intrinsically hazardous. E.g., gasoline, lithium ion batteries, bombs.
Super capacitors of some kind. Olde teevees has some big ones that would knock you on your bum if you were not careful pulling tubes to take over to the drug store to test on their tube tester.
/ how many of you Wonks ever tested tubes from a tv?
It's a beautiful idea and it works. The only opposition is the utility and oil companies. The Gila River Indian Community in AZ started work on a project a couple years ago.
BTW- A careful deconstruction and analysis of impactful and important 20th century literature shows us that solar power has always been very important. After all, Superman himself depends entirely upon our yellow sun for his super powered abilities.
More detailed analysis of his powers being changed as he moves through outer space and encounters stars with different hues can be found at the various comic book nerd websites. If you do visit you can always stir up a post modern dialectical fracas by asking why Kal-El's power isn't negated by the red part of a rainbow's spectrum. Throw in a reference to the Olde Testament promise of Crom behaving himself in the future and sending rainbows as a sign of divine promise. That gets the four color fur flying!
I don't know how deep you want to go down that rabbit hole. Some of that is from the same era when Batman painted an entire room (and himself) yellow to render Green Lantern powerless, or when Lex's whole reason for hating Superman was blaming Kal-El for making him bald.
We are fortunate that you only bring that kind of thing up at the mommy blog! If you mentioned it at the nerd comic fan blogs you would be condemned and banned immediately.
As solar panel efficiency popped over 20%, the economics flipped on fossil fuels. Unfortunately the energy companies see more short term opportunities in investing in politicians than technology.
I don't trust any polling. But the trend of these polls matches what I'm seeing in people around me who aren't 24/7 Fox watchers, the results of every election since 2024, and just the sheer amount of turnout we're already seeing for this election in early voting. So I'm optimistic.
An enormous fire all but destroyed an infamous Nazi-era guesthouse known as the Eagle’s Nest in southern Germany, according to the police, who said on Saturday that a man had been arrested in connection with the blaze.
The Earth emits. The wavelengths are different, but the energy rising from under your feet could power your home in a manner similar to a solar panel except 24-7. The conversion to electricity has already been done in the lab.
I once met Hans Bethe, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for building the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, which explains how fusion powers the sun. One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century.
Yes he lived to age 98 and he was basically the last living pioneer of quantum mechanics when he passed. He palled around with Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, etc in the early days.
I met him when he came to visit MIT and give a physics colloquium. I think he was probably about 90 at the time.
Neighbors across the street just installed solar. That makes 4 houses on the block, including mine. I was the only one for a decade, but in the past three years, people are getting on board.
The cost of a system has also dropped by nearly three-quarters in that time, at least here in Minneapolis. And the power monopoly, Xcel Energy, seems to know they can't maintain, much less improve, the grid as electrical consumption increases.
They used to be really uncooperative about solar, and adamantly opposed to battery storage and transfer disconnect switches. That has changed completely.
Everything in my apartment is electric. It's the only utility bill I have to pay. I'd love it if the company that owns this place put solar on all our units, but I don't know that they'll be willing to spend that much.
We're moving in that direction. Our house, built in 1922, had no appliance outlets installed. Everything gas, or powered by 110v.
I've had them installed for dryer and range. Our kitchen appliances were crap and starting to fail, so we replaced them last year. I'm not crazy about the electric stove but the oven bakes beautifully.
The dryer is getting old and when it needs work we'll go electric with that. The gas furnace and water heater are pretty new though. Might be a while before I pull the pin on those. And electric heat in Minnesota? When there's 9 hours a day of sun, low in the sky? Get out the checkbook.
An electric stove takes some getting used to, but I've learned to use the time between turning off the burner and when it actually gets cold. And even in a gas stove you have to learn each one differently, because none of them have the exact same heat at the exact same spot on the controls.
True. I just worked in kitchens long enough to eyeball the flame pretty accurately. I'm getting used to it, slowly.
It's fun to have an oven with a fan in it for convection and what they pretend is air-frying. Some awesome tater tots. And great baked goods, it's precise and very even.
We did have to get a flat-bottomed wok.
And yes, before you ask; it does make my wok'in' world go 'round.
Somewhere in the bowels of the company, an actuary figured out how much they can SAVE by having a portion of the power NOT have to go through their grid.
I love Canada and Canadians! My current travel goal is to visit all ten provinces. Six down and four to go (NB, NS, PEI, NL). In my next life, I will be Canadian. 🍁
> Here Comes the Sun argues that the economics of cheap, abundant clean energy make the energy transition nearly inevitable. Unfortunately, as McKibben points out, there’s a powerful political drag on that transition: “The fossil fuel industry is fighting hard because it understands the math.”
From Chris Hayes' seminal article "The New Abolition" in "The Nation" **over a dozen years ago**: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/new-abolitionism/ [archive: https://archive.ph/DgKbj ]. Which, as it happens, references McKibben.
'The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world’s energy companies and major fossil fuel–producing countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is in the ground that we can, with present technology, extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is… 2,795 gigatons. Which means the total amount of known, proven extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is almost *five times* the amount we can safely burn.
'Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate movement is to find a way to force the powers that be, from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into your stocks? You can’t have it.
'Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.
'The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.'
[Standard, obvious disclaimer that this is about political economics, not trying to draw some kind of moral equivalence between human enslavement and burning fossils.]
'More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition.'
Good day, fellow sarcastic nymphs!
I'm in Palm Springs with friends. We're renting a house for the weekend, and there's a huge solar array on the roof.
Terrible white rapper, “Pardon Power,” thinks he is really popular as he prepares to win election by cheating
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-insists-his-job-approval-is-somehow-actually-60-amid-sinking-polling-i-dont-believe-i-could-be-beaten-by-anybody/
Trump is delusional. This isn't news, Mediaite.
He has a plan to win, and by a lot!
I am reviewing research journals concerning Building Integrated Photovoltaic Arrays (BIPV) in areas that experience Wildland fires in Urban areas. That is a big threat in the San Antonio/ Austin area. We do a lot of solar in Austin. We have building code requirements that requires dedicating the area of roofs on large buildings for PV arrays. We're seeing more projects where LiB (lithium ion battery) are being integrated.
All materials/structures that can store a large amount of energy in a small volume are going to be intrinsically hazardous. E.g., gasoline, lithium ion batteries, bombs.
We need more work on SIBs (sodium ion batteries). Also and three, something other than a "battery" for on-site storage of electrical power.
I'm not sure what alternatives to batteries you're thinking of, but there is a lot of work in alternatives to lithium.
Super capacitors of some kind. Olde teevees has some big ones that would knock you on your bum if you were not careful pulling tubes to take over to the drug store to test on their tube tester.
/ how many of you Wonks ever tested tubes from a tv?
Microwaves too.
Why would we want to make electronics larger after a century of making them smaller?
The solar farmer only has to plant his crop once. In California, where I live part-time, a solar panel-covered aqueduct was just completed. It will generate electricity and reduce evaporation and algae. Win! Win! Win! --https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/04/29/governor-newsom-announces-the-completion-of-first-of-its-kind-solar-covered-canal-in-the-central-valley-piloting-a-new-way-to-save-water-and-reduce-costs/
It's a beautiful idea and it works. The only opposition is the utility and oil companies. The Gila River Indian Community in AZ started work on a project a couple years ago.
https://azbex.com/planning-development/gric-advancing-solar-canal-project/
reduce algae?? We should put panels over the reflecting pond.
Yo MRK! This is the program I mentioned earlier. Science is so cool.
BTW- A careful deconstruction and analysis of impactful and important 20th century literature shows us that solar power has always been very important. After all, Superman himself depends entirely upon our yellow sun for his super powered abilities.
More detailed analysis of his powers being changed as he moves through outer space and encounters stars with different hues can be found at the various comic book nerd websites. If you do visit you can always stir up a post modern dialectical fracas by asking why Kal-El's power isn't negated by the red part of a rainbow's spectrum. Throw in a reference to the Olde Testament promise of Crom behaving himself in the future and sending rainbows as a sign of divine promise. That gets the four color fur flying!
I don't know how deep you want to go down that rabbit hole. Some of that is from the same era when Batman painted an entire room (and himself) yellow to render Green Lantern powerless, or when Lex's whole reason for hating Superman was blaming Kal-El for making him bald.
We are fortunate that you only bring that kind of thing up at the mommy blog! If you mentioned it at the nerd comic fan blogs you would be condemned and banned immediately.
As solar panel efficiency popped over 20%, the economics flipped on fossil fuels. Unfortunately the energy companies see more short term opportunities in investing in politicians than technology.
Fucking corporations. Reality doesn’t exist beyond the next fiscal quarter report.
People think they can make more moving money around rather than building and improving things.
We need some of that, but it's become entirely too much of the economy.
Does MBA stand for Masters in Bidness Assholery?
This is a big part of the problem of tying so much to the stock market, particularly executive compensation, and then allowing stock buybacks.
'McKibben has a great (admittedly fantasy) idea about China’s dominance of the solar panel trade:"
Sure is a good thing that we're leading the AI race to develop tech that will eventually kill us all.
OT: fascinating Nice Times article about why the polling for 2026 is probably right and why this isn't 2022
https://fascistheckler.substack.com/p/why-i-doubt-polls-are-overfavoring?r=25ocek&utm_medium=ios
I don't trust any polling. But the trend of these polls matches what I'm seeing in people around me who aren't 24/7 Fox watchers, the results of every election since 2024, and just the sheer amount of turnout we're already seeing for this election in early voting. So I'm optimistic.
Disappointing news for Stephen Miller as he now has to cancel this airbnb item off his bucket list.
The New York Times
@nytimes.com
An enormous fire all but destroyed an infamous Nazi-era guesthouse known as the Eagle’s Nest in southern Germany, according to the police, who said on Saturday that a man had been arrested in connection with the blaze.
https://bsky.app/profile/nytimes.com/post/3mymrlfwjb22b
Many people are saying that it was Miller who was arrested for causing the fire due to heat buildup while he was rubbing one out in Hitler's bedroom.
Damnatio memoriae.
That was Hitler’s personal mountain retreat, not just some guesthouse.
And nothing of value was lost.
The Earth emits. The wavelengths are different, but the energy rising from under your feet could power your home in a manner similar to a solar panel except 24-7. The conversion to electricity has already been done in the lab.
I can't find anything on that. Do you have a link?
Aussies. They published something a couple of years back. University of NSW captured nighttime emissions of infrared using themoradiative diodes. There’s also rectifying antennas. https://www.facebook.com/theengineeringbrains/posts/researchers-at-the-university-of-new-south-wales-unsw-have-demonstrated-a-protot/1350920027206514/
It’s just a matter of time.
Putting solar panels between your crops and the sun *increases* crop yield? 🤯
Plants like sunshine, but like people, they’re not keen on heat.
I assume it depends on the crops.
Might also save on irrigation, in some cases.
We know it saves on irrigation. California proved that this year.
I'd missed that, but it just made sense.
They put solar panels over a few waterways as a pilot program. Check it out.
I once met Hans Bethe, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for building the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, which explains how fusion powers the sun. One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century.
And still, one of the best things he ever did is co-author a paper with Alpher and Gamow.
Bethe's work remains over my head, but I do remember he was beloved over his long tenure at Cornell. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/collections/1b50d5a0-59d3-464d-8296-f2290a549c19/search
Yes he lived to age 98 and he was basically the last living pioneer of quantum mechanics when he passed. He palled around with Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, etc in the early days.
I met him when he came to visit MIT and give a physics colloquium. I think he was probably about 90 at the time.
Neighbors across the street just installed solar. That makes 4 houses on the block, including mine. I was the only one for a decade, but in the past three years, people are getting on board.
The cost of a system has also dropped by nearly three-quarters in that time, at least here in Minneapolis. And the power monopoly, Xcel Energy, seems to know they can't maintain, much less improve, the grid as electrical consumption increases.
They used to be really uncooperative about solar, and adamantly opposed to battery storage and transfer disconnect switches. That has changed completely.
Everything in my apartment is electric. It's the only utility bill I have to pay. I'd love it if the company that owns this place put solar on all our units, but I don't know that they'll be willing to spend that much.
We're moving in that direction. Our house, built in 1922, had no appliance outlets installed. Everything gas, or powered by 110v.
I've had them installed for dryer and range. Our kitchen appliances were crap and starting to fail, so we replaced them last year. I'm not crazy about the electric stove but the oven bakes beautifully.
The dryer is getting old and when it needs work we'll go electric with that. The gas furnace and water heater are pretty new though. Might be a while before I pull the pin on those. And electric heat in Minnesota? When there's 9 hours a day of sun, low in the sky? Get out the checkbook.
An electric stove takes some getting used to, but I've learned to use the time between turning off the burner and when it actually gets cold. And even in a gas stove you have to learn each one differently, because none of them have the exact same heat at the exact same spot on the controls.
True. I just worked in kitchens long enough to eyeball the flame pretty accurately. I'm getting used to it, slowly.
It's fun to have an oven with a fan in it for convection and what they pretend is air-frying. Some awesome tater tots. And great baked goods, it's precise and very even.
We did have to get a flat-bottomed wok.
And yes, before you ask; it does make my wok'in' world go 'round.
Somewhere in the bowels of the company, an actuary figured out how much they can SAVE by having a portion of the power NOT have to go through their grid.
And not having money tied building more power stations.
Just bought the book.
Had to get it from the Big River Company, because Bookshop.org wouldn't take my money. Doesn't like Canadians, I guess.
I love Canada and Canadians! My current travel goal is to visit all ten provinces. Six down and four to go (NB, NS, PEI, NL). In my next life, I will be Canadian. 🍁