I'm William Brangham and this is Horizons. As the impact from the war in Iran grinds on, Americans are feeling it in their wallets at the gas station. Evangelists for clean energy say this sudden oil shock is an opportunity, once again, to embrace the transition to renewable power like wind and solar. With energy prices on the rise, are Americans open to a new way of powering our world? Coming up next. MUSIC Welcome to Horizons from PBS News. As I came into work today, I passed a few gas stations. Regular unleaded is now well over $4 a gallon here in the DC area. Diesel is pushing $6. Americans and Israel's attacks on Iran have driven up the cost of energy globally, and it is taking a big chunk out of American wallets. For years, the environmental and climate movement has been trying to convince people that renewable energy is the future. The kind of power we can get mostly for free by angling a sheet of glass and aluminum at the sun, or building a big windmill and standing it up in the breeze. They argued that the cost of air pollution and climate change, with its myriad natural disasters and disruptions, was reason enough to stop burning so much coal and oil and gas. But now, with the additional cost of those fuels becoming clear to everyone, they argue it is even more important to make this energy transition. So we want to talk today with two clean energy evangelists about this moment that we are in, and whether this country will embrace the future they argue we so desperately need. Bill McKibben is one of the country's leading environmental activists. He's co-founder of the 350.org Global Environmental Campaign and Third Act, an organization that helps older Americans get involved in climate work. McKibben is also a prolific writer and the author most recently of Here Comes the Sun, a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization. Bill joins us from Vermont. And here in the studio is Jigar Shah. He is co-managing partner and co-founder of the clean technology advisory firm, Multiplier. Earlier, he directed the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration, where he oversaw billions of dollars in loans to renewable energy projects. He also co-hosts the excellent Open Circuit podcast, which is all about this energy transition. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Bill McKibben, to you first. For people who don't appreciate this renewable transition that we are in the midst of, just brag a little bit. Remind our audience about the amount of energy that renewables are already producing in the here and now. I was just looking at the numbers. The world is producing about a third more energy from the sun this spring than we were last spring. The growth over the last 36 months has been astonishing. About 90% of new generation, new electric generation around the world has come from the sun and the wind. Jigar, what would you add to that? Again, for people who, every time I talk about this, people are surprised that renewables are delivering so much power now. What would help us understand this? Right now, I think everyone is really talking about load growth. Whether it's AI data centers, or whether it's electric vehicles, or whether it's heat pumps, or new manufacturing facilities. If you look at not only the United States, but also the entire world, as Bill suggested, almost 100% of all of that growth globally came from solar, wind, some nuclear power. That's new electricity being added. That's right. Any new coal that was added was offset with a retiring coal plant. Any new gas plant that was added was offset with a retiring gas plant. I just think people don't really understand that all new stuff is coming from clean sources, and that new stuff is accelerating exponentially. When you think about last year, it may have been 500 units of new solar. This year, it's 700 units of new solar. Next year, it'll be 800 units of new solar. It's not growing by one unit, two units. It's growing by 20% every year. It is shocking how fast it's growing. People have a hard time thinking exponentially. They really have a hard time fathoming what that looks like. Bill, why do you think it is such a surprise to people that just as Jigger is describing, this transition is happening right before our eyes, and yet it does seem, when people hear about it, to be like, a what? That's really happening? So two reasons. One, we've spent our whole lives calling this stuff alternative energy. And so it kind of lives in this corner of our mind. We think of it, I think, sometimes as like the whole foods of energy. It's nice, but pricey for special people. In fact, it's now the costco of energy. It's the stuff, the cheap stuff available in bulk on the shelf ready to go. Five years ago or so, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind, then from burning things called gas oil. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The second reason that Americans have a hard time understanding this is that we are the one country on earth that's currently trying hard to prevent it from happening. Our federal government, I don't think it's too much to say is engaged in an all out war against sun and wind power. Their economics of these energies are so favorable that they won't single handedly be able to stop it, but they are doing their best to slow it down, mostly with a kind of campaign of disinformation to try and somehow convince Americans that it's expensive or unreliable or all the things that might have been true a decade or two ago, but manifestly are just nonsense today. Jigar, do you believe that the economics have a power of their own that is unstoppable? I do, but it's even more than that. So today, because of the conflict in Iran, we are now talking about national security and economic security. Right. So if you are a country that built a natural gas plant that requires an LNG train to come in to power that natural gas plant, you are in trouble right now because of the streets of Hormuz. If you are a country that requires importation of coal or importation of oil or finished products like gasoline or diesel or fuel oil, you are looking for ways of generating power locally. And so this is not really about climate for most of the decision makers. It's really about how do we use what we have in our country. One example I'll give you is Lebanon, which has been in the news a lot today. Lebanon actually went from 1% solar power two years ago to 30% solar power this week. Wow. Right. Pakistan did something very similar from 2021 to 2025. And so you're in this place where when things get tough, this technology can rise to the occasion in a way that the other technologies cannot. So now it's a national security and economic security solution. But Bill, as you were saying, please go right ahead. I think Jigger is absolutely right. But I think you can go even almost one step deeper than that. Fossil fuel has been synonymous for 200 years with a series of things that humans like it's been about security. It's been about freedom. It's been about power. But those things as Jigger points out are no longer the case. After the war in the Gulf, fossil fuel is about instability. And if you want safety, suddenly we're turning very strongly in this direction. No world leader is going to want to be held accountable to the Middle East, to Vladimir Putin, to Donald Trump for their energy supply. Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. But Bill, to your point, you're saying the US is still such a big player in the global. We are no longer the premier polluter, but I think number two behind China. And yet, as you're saying, this federal government has done an about face on that. Do you think that that sets back this movement in a substantial way? I do. I think that it's quite possible for the US government to delay. Indeed, it already has. The Trump administration has tried to shut down wind farms that were 90% complete off the Atlantic seaboard. Two weeks ago, we found out that US taxpayers are going to get to spend $1 billion buying back the lease rights to wind power off the coast, off the Atlantic coast, to make sure that it never gets captured. So they're doing everything in their power. And the reason is not mysterious. I mean, candidate Trump literally told the heads of the big oil companies that if they gave him $1 billion for his campaign, they would, he would do whatever they wanted. And so he has. That's why it's important that Americans who care about this stuff stand up at the federal level when elections give us a chance, but right now at the state and local level do to do very straightforward things that would allow us to continue this progress here as around the rest of the world. At third act, we've been running this simplify solar campaign. As Jigger knows, one of the things that makes it hard for Americans is it costs three times as much to put solar panel on your roof as it would in Australia or Europe, mostly because we have too much bureaucracy in the way. And we need to take that out at the state and local level so that America can start to benefit from the fact that what do you know the sun shines on this country too. Jigger, what else? Bill's describing some of the things at the local level that really give him hope that we could push through this period. What else do you, when you look at the country, what else gives you hope about this transition? Well, I think that if you wanted to take full control of your energy picture at home, the only way to do it is solar and battery storage, right? You can't do it by having a diesel generator in your backyard or a fuel cell in your backyard or something like that. So 500,000 American households choose to go that way every single year. And the one place that we've forgotten about is rural America. Rural America has 25 million homes, but most of these solar panels have gone into suburban America. And I think what you'll see this year is there's a lot of folks who have an independent streak in rural America who want to be a part of this. And they have less of those constraints around permits and some of those things that get blocked. They can really put something that looks like a shed in their backyard in all of an hour and a half, you know, to put 16 kilowatts of solar on their roof and get their energy bill to zero, right? And so the products are getting so much easier to put in place. And I think some of these places haven't really been focused on and will focus on them now. And as a proud and lifetime resident of rural America, sometimes in red states, sometimes in purple ones, I can tell you I've got lots of neighbors who have trump flags on the mailbox and solar panels on the roof. They're doing it not necessarily out of concern about climate change. More likely they are to say, my home is my castle and it's a better castle if it's got an independent power supply. I mean, I put up my solar panels 25 years ago because I cared about the climate, but I'm enough of an American to feel that independence argument too. I mean, Jigger, the argument, one of the arguments that has been put forward for years is that, as Bill was saying, renewables are alternative. They are nice for when the sun is out or when the wind is blowing, but they cannot supply the power that we need every single moment that we want to turn on a switch or power a factory or a plant. How do you respond to that argument, that they're just not there yet? Well, I look, I think it's important to recognize that the electricity grid is what actually powers our factories, Costco, your home, right? It's not solar or wind or battery storage or coal or natural gas. It's the grid, right? And that grid has shifted. It used to be 50% coal. It's now very, like, you know, very small percentage of coal. It, you know, was 20% nuclear power. That number has come down to about 17%. Solar power has gone from zero all the way up to about 10% of the entire grid now. So that shifts, right? And so I think it's important to recognize that it's not solar or battery storage or others. It's proud Americans who actually manage this complicated system that we call the grid. And all of it gets, you know, like balanced within that process, right? But when you think about what Bill has been talking about, the cheapest way to get those electrons right now are solar, wind and battery storage. And so that is what's getting built. And no one cares about the, you know, like CO2 footprint or all that stuff when they're making those financial decisions. They're just saying who wants to buy them. Right, keep my lights on cheaply. Yeah, exactly. And so like, I just think it's crystal, it's super important. The other thing I would suggest is the narrative matters. So a lot of people have been talking about natural gas, for instance, right? And when you look at combined cycle gas turbines, those are very efficient units and they used to cost $900 per unit. They now cost $2,400 a unit, right? So as a result, they're no longer cost effective to install. And people keep conflating the fact that like sometimes the local hospital and the local nursing home do have a natural gas generator in the back, just in case you have a power outage. That doesn't mean they're running a natural gas, right? They're running on the grid, right? They just have these backup, some because of regulation, some because, you know, like in a power outage, you want to make sure people can use elevators. But it's important for us to recognize that the fact that people are buying backup natural gas generators for data centers or whatever it is, doesn't mean that they're running them, right? 90% of what we got is solar. Jigger is too humble to boast about the work that he was doing in the Biden years. But one of its big results was an explosion of battery production in this country. And if the last three or four years was about the rise of solar and wind power, the next two or three years are going to be about the deployment of batteries everywhere on that grid and elsewhere to make that solar and wind power all the more valuable. If you look at the numbers from California this year, what we're seeing all of a sudden is that from nine in the morning to six at night, the state's basically running on solar power. But from six o'clock to nine or 10 o'clock at night, it's basically running on batteries that were soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. The battery problem was a deep one for a century. We batteries didn't get much better. Now they're getting better with each passing month. And that is causing extraordinary shifts in how we can deploy energy. Jigger, you mentioned how the narrative is important in this. And I want to put up this Pew poll that just came out recently. And it was asking Americans which energy supply they wanted the federal government to be focusing on. And according to this poll, you see a sharp decline in support for expanding wind and solar and a rise in support for expanding fossil fuels. Now there's a partisan split there, obviously. Democrats supporting the renewables and Republicans supporting the fossil fuels. But we still do have a divide in this country that seemingly argues against everything you're arguing for. I don't think so. Look, I think that in that same poll, people also said they really wanted the lowest possible electricity bills. And that comes from solar wind and battery storage. And so I just think that it depends on how you ask the question. But when you ask people in rural America that are served by rural electric co-ops or municipal utilities, why their electricity bills are so low, it's because they're using wind and solar and battery storage. I mean, the states that use the most wind power in the entire country are the states from North Dakota all the way down to the Panhandle of Texas. These are not like, you know, blue states, right? They're 30%, 40%, 50% wind powered, right? They don't talk about it. They just say, you're powered by the grid, and we have figured out how to keep your bills low, right? And I think that that is really what American families want is they want reliable power. It turns out when they flip the switch, and they want to make sure that it's as low cost as possible. Bill, do you... William, look at your own poll. It was showing 60, 40 almost support for sun and wind over oil and gas, which is pretty remarkable since oil and gas have been the incumbent thing forever. If we had an election that goes 60, 40, we call it a landslide. There's huge support among Americans for making this transition. So what do you see, Bill, as still some of the remaining impediments to moving this ball down the field even more? Well, the biggest impediment to moving this ball down the field is the occupant of the White House, who has in A, a corrupt relationship with the oil and gas industry, and B, an unwavering hatred of renewable energy, mostly because he didn't want to look at wind turbines from the 9th fairway of his Scottish golf course. Getting him out of the way, which we can start doing with midterm elections, would be a help. But we also need to build that people power. That's why we did this big Sunday event last September that had 500 gatherings across the country of all kinds with people coming out to celebrate renewable energy. I think the more that the word gets out, and the word is getting out, and this crazy war over the last six weeks will turn out to have done more to get that word out than almost anything else. If you look at the traffic into showrooms for EVs, if you look at Google searches around solar panels, they have gone through the roof over the last six weeks. If we can keep doing that organizing work at places like Third Act, then we have a real chance at not stopping global warming at this point, but of shaving tens of a degree off how plot the planet gets, and of moving us off an energy source that is invariably the favorite of oligarchs everywhere in favor of sun and wind, which are available to all communities in every place. Do you feel, Jigger, that political persuasion is important? I mean, you were arguing before that economics is just the thing that will move the needle here. I have actually heard you also argue that high gas prices, which some environmentalists have said, oh, that will drive people to EVs and to alternative sources if it costs too much. Do you still believe that those are the levers that will push people even further in this direction? I do, but I also think that people want to depoliticize these important issues. I mean, when you look at the technologies that we've talked about on this show, they're all technologies that we invented at the U.S. National Labs from the U.S. Department of Energy, right? And then they got scaled up in China and deployed there, and we're importing them back. I think Americans want to do big things again. We don't want to just invent things. We want to make things, right? And so you see a huge manufacturing facility going in in Texas from T1 that our friend Russell Gold, who used to be at the Wall Street Journal, is now working at. You see a huge solar manufacturing facility going up in Georgia. You see hemlock and corning really ramping up the production of wafers and silicon wafers that then make solar panels. You see glass manufacturing plants getting built. People are getting life-altering jobs in these places because we're building things in this country again, right? And I think that's what people want to see, Rivians manufacturing and shipping. There are two here this month, right? And so I think it's a fantastic time to see Americans not just invent things, but build big things here. Bill, in the last minute or so, whenever we're talking about renewable and green energy, you do often hear people say, well, what about nuclear? And I wonder what your take on that is. Where do you see that fitting in this mix? My guess is, I have no real problems with it. My guess is it's going to be not anywhere near as big as sun and wind simply because of the economics. It is so cheap to make power from the sun and the wind now that everything else has a hard time competing with it. Maybe we'll come up with really cost-effective small modular reactors or other forms of new nuclear development. But I think that to the degree that we're able to make this energy transition over the next few years, which climate science demands, most of the heavy lifting is going to be done by this trinity of sun and wind and batteries. Bill McKibbin, joining us from Vermont and Jigarshaw. Thank you both so much for being here. Really, really appreciate the conversation. Thank you. Thank you. A real pleasure. Thanks so much. Before we go, we've been talking about how to harness clean energy to help preserve life here on Earth. And this week, we got another look at just how precious and beautiful this little rock we live on is. These views of Earth seen across the barren face of the moon come from the crew of the Artemis II mission, NASA's 10-day loop out and around the moon. The crew, Reed, Weissman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook, and Jeremy Hansen got to bring cell phones. So of course we got some extraterrestrial selfies, but also quieter moments. Hansen getting a quick shave using an iPhone as a mirror, or Cook peering out the window at Earth. The images of Earth they captured are breathtaking, a thin blue crescent framed by the vast darkness of space. Or here, where three distinct auroras and light displays can be seen glowing inside our thin protective atmosphere. Astronomer Carl Sagan famously wrote that seeing our pale blue dot, as he called it, from this vantage point, should be a call to arms to all of us to protect the one home that we have. Quote, The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life, he wrote. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes, settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. That is it for this episode of Horizons. Thank you so much for watching.
