Happy Wednesday folks. Today I wanted to share a story Science Friday recently did about the rise in solar power. Across the world, solar power is becoming a major contributor to energy — but the Trump administration is pushing back. Will the rest of the world leave us behind? Will solar’s benefits outweigh Trump’s attempts to stop it? There’s a lot that remains to be seen over the next decade, but it’s a good story with some good insight — not just into the adoption of solar power, but in some of its secondary benefits. Shade!

IRA FLATOW: But most of the solar panels in the world come from China, right? They’re the–

BILL MCKIBBEN: Yep.

IRA FLATOW: –the champion of solar panel makers. What about the tariffs imposed on China now? Is that going to cut back the use of them?

BILL MCKIBBEN: That’ll definitely divert a lot of those panels to other places, who will get the benefit of the cheap energy they provide. For climate purposes, we need to convert everyone. And of course, what President Biden tried to do with the Inflation Reduction Act was to make America a producer of solar panels, too, with some success. The biggest solar panel factory in the US now is, in all places, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia.

So they did their best. But the scare that all of this put into the fossil fuel industry motivated them to do everything they could to game our political system. You’ll recall, about this time last year, then-candidate Trump telling the fossil fuel industry that for $1 billion in campaign donations, they could have absolutely anything they wanted.

The industry came through with about a half billion dollars in donations, advertising, lobbying during the last election cycle. And that proves to have been plenty because they’re getting every possible thing that they could from the Trump administration. I don’t think that it will be enough to reverse the momentum, certainly, not in the rest of the world.

But of course, the problem is that it comes at a crucial moment. We have very limited time to deal with the climate crisis, as you know better than just about any journalist on the planet, because you’ve been covering it so faithfully for so long. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us a couple of years ago that to stay on a path, anything like the one we set in Paris, we’d need to cut emissions in half by 2030, which, by my watch, is four years and six months away, not leaving us a great deal of margin.

So along with everything else, in this country, we’re going to have to make the case again for renewable energy. We’re having a big nationwide day of action on the fall equinox, September 21, that we’re calling not Earth Day, but Sun Day. And the point of it, Ira, is to drive home something that I think really needs to get through people’s heads.

This is no longer the Whole Foods of energy– nice, but pricey. This is the Costco of energy. It’s cheap. It’s available in bulk. It’s on the shelf, ready to go. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is an incredibly liberating notion, for all kinds of reasons, right down to the fact that even human beings are going to be hard-pressed to figure out how to fight a war over sunshine. If we can get this done, then we live in a different world on the other side.

Be kind and thoughtful today. Cheers.