Yr Wonkette is reading our new book club selection, Bill McKibben’s 2025 bestseller Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (Wonkette affiliate link), and by gosh, it’s giving us a much-needed dose of optimism in these dark times. Our hope isn’t just a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s a whole goddamn STAR.
As we said last week: Yes, climate change is here right now and having disastrous effects on the planet and all life upon it, including clever ape descendants who know a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference when they see one. But the tools we need to stop our self-imposed baking — mostly solar and wind power backed by battery storage — are also here right now, in a cinematically timed arrival at nearly the last minute.
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.”
We’re all writing the end of the movie now, in a race to eliminate most fossil fuel use by midcentury. McKibben knows that won’t be easy; he began writing Here Comes the Sun in December 2024, just after That Man was elected again, in part thanks to huge spending by Big Oil. While McKibben composed his book, he could see Trump tearing down nearly all of Joe Biden’s climate initiatives even as Los Angeles went up in flames, so the writing took on greater urgency.
For all that, Here Comes the Sun is not a gloomy book, because as McKibben says in his introduction, the momentum favors a rapid energy transition, as long as we keep fighting to make it happen. And hey, what a coincidence: We’re reading this crucial book together right before voters in the US midterm elections might elect a Congress that can restrain Trump.
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Now for the Book Club details: If you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of Here Comes the Sun in whatever format you prefer; if you get it from Wonkette’s bookshop.com link here, Yr Wonkette gets a 10 percent cut, but the book has been out long enough that you should also be able to find it at libraries or used bookstores. (We went over some audiobook options in last week’s post.)
At just 200 pages, Here Comes the Sun is a fairly short read, and McKibben helpfully divided it into three sections, so let’s read this thing over the next three weeks. Here’s your syllabus, class, and yes, you can read ahead. It’s nonfiction, so no spoilers possible.
Sunday, November 1: Introduction and Section One, “We Could Do This.”
Sunday, November 8: Section Two, “There’s No Reason Not To Do This.”
Sunday, November 15: Section Three, “Let’s Do This!”
??? (Probably also November 15 would make sense; we’ll see): Video Book Chat meeting to wrap up. It’ll be our first Dok Zoom Zoom! Thornton will probably block my webcam! BYO sunshine.
For all Book Club posts, it’s great if you actually read the “assigned” reading that week, but feel free to jump in and discuss the post even if you didn’t because we aren’t taking attendance and it’s not a class. For Book Club posts only, I will be a real booger about telling you to please keep off-topic comments in other threads. Besides, Wonkette does not allow comments anyway.
Hope you’re enjoying the book, and I’m really looking forward to discussing Section One with y’all next week! And now, how about a bunch of neat solar energy/climate news links, Tabs style:
Neat Clean Energy / Climate News, Tabs Style
I finally got around to reading this terrific December 2025 New York Times article (gift link) about how cheap solar panels made in China are making lives better across Africa. McKibben has a great (admittedly fantasy) idea about China’s dominance of the solar panel trade:
[Perhaps the] smartest course would simply be for everyone else to pay to run China’s solar panel factories—instead of nationalizing an industry, you could globalize it. Those panel factories are currently operating at half capacity, but if you ran around the clock you’d be producing as many panels as climate scientists say are required—about a terawatt a year. And then you could—well, you could just drop the panels on every wharf and pier and rail siding on the planet and walk away, letting people build out the new energy economy all by themselves.
Impossible given political/economic realities, but yeah, I’d visit the universe where we did that! (NYT gift link)
An Italian winemaker installed more than 7,000 solar panels above its vineyard, and the vines shaded by the panels grew longer than those in the sun, producing heavier bunches of grapes with less sugar. (AutoNotion)
More agrivoltaics! In France, installing a canopy of solar panels five meters above cornfields boosted yields by 20 percent, even during this past summer’s awful heat wave. (Good Green News)
A new study found that solar farms can help stop dust storms. As McKibben notes, solar farms can also help remediate some of the effects of global warming, since soil under the shade of panels in arid regions is just plain better. (Renew Economy)
Australian rooftop solar installations continue to go, well, through the roof. (Guardian) An Australian company won a national design award for a device that allows residents of apartment buildings to share rooftop solar without having a bunch of new wiring to their units. (Guardian again) EV sales in Australia doubled over the last year, and one in four new cars are electric. (ABC, the Australian one)
Europe’s boom in solar energy has saved the EU €37.4 billion in energy costs since the start of Trump’s idiotic Iran War. (EuroNews) A new study by clean energy think tank Ember found that in countries that import oil, adoption of EVS has saved $20 billion on fuel costs since the idiot war started. Denmark, with one of Europe’s highest rates of EV adoption, has cut its oil imports by 13 percent this year. (Good Green News)
Finally, a wind farm in South Africa painted red stripes on one blade each of four wind turbines, resulting in 83 percent fewer bird strikes among those turbines. (Eco News) Somebody tell Donald Trump about this, stat! And while you’re at it, fib that cancer rates in the area are also down sharply.
Have fun reading, kids!
[NYT (gift link) / [All other nice time tabs found through the Uplifting News subReddit.]
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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.
Sorry, but I can't read about this. I think of how much progress we could have made toward clean energy by now if this country weren't run by a big bunch of assholes voted into office by a bigger bunch of assholes, and it makes me furious and despairing.