Our Last, Best Chance to Cool the Earth | Bill McKibben | TED

00:04The Earth is producing about a third more power from the sun this spring than last. That solar power is suddenly so cheap and abundant that Australians will soon get three hours of electricity free every afternoon, free. After 400,000 years of working hard for energy, from gathering firewood to paying the power bill, some humans will suddenly have access to this commodity for nothing.

00:35California, fourth largest economy in the world, now produces most days more than 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy. At night, when the sun goes down, big new batteries on the grid turn dark into daylight. In Pakistan, peasant farmers who used to pay through the nose for diesel power to run their irrigation pumps are using 30 percent less of the fuel than they were two years ago, in large part because they've imported millions of cheap Chinese solar panels and gone on YouTube to figure out how to connect them up.

01:17They often lack the money to build the steel scaffolding we're used to seeing at solar farms. No matter. They just lay them on the ground and point them at the sun. In a world where many, many big things have taken a very dark turn this decade, this is the one big thing that is going right.

01:40We have quite suddenly the opportunity to build a clean, abundant future if we simply seize it. But most of us don't recognize how huge this moment is. In part, that's because we've spent decades calling this stuff “alternative energy,” and it's blinded us to the fact that it's now the obvious, common-sense, straightforward way to power the future.

02:07Roughly 90 percent of new electric generation around the world last year came from the sun and the wind. And that, in turn, is because earlier this decade, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun than from burning coal and gas and oil.

02:26Let me repeat, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. (Applause) If we can keep the staggering growth of the last 36 months going, then we could enter an extraordinary new age. Consider.

02:48Eight or nine million people a year die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuels. That's one death in five on this planet. But the Chinese cities, whose air was so foul a few years ago that you couldn't see across the street, are suddenly much cleaner.

03:05Most of the cars sold there now come with a plug, and it connects them to the vast solar and wind farms that the Chinese are building faster than anyone on Earth. More fundamentally, this energy transition is our only real chance of even starting to catch up with the physics of climate change.

03:25It's too late to stop global warming. But it's not too late to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually get. And each 10th of a degree that we raise the temperature moves 100 million of our brothers and sisters out of a safe climate zone and into a more perilous one.

03:46This new age would come with one other great bonus. Unlike fossil fuels, which are concentrated in a few places, the sun's energy is available everywhere. Instead of, say, attacking Venezuela to secure its oil or threatening to cut off Europe's gas supply to force the subjugation of Ukraine, we get to imagine a world where hydrocarbons no longer equal wealth and power.

04:12Imagine how many fewer wars and coups and terrorist plots we would have seen in the last century if oil had been of trivial value. As this spring has reminded us, humans are all too good at starting wars. But even for us, figuring out how to fight one over sunshine will be tricky.

04:33Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. (Applause) So what’s good news? Unless, of course, you own an oil well or a coal mine. Then the rise of clean energy becomes an extraordinary threat, one that mobilizes you to fight back.

05:01In the US, for instance, candidate Trump told the oil industry that if they donated huge sums, he would have their back. In his first year in office, he shut down huge wind farms off the eastern seaboard killed solar farms across the country.

05:17Now Trump can’t stop clean energy single-handedly. It's not like he's Jesus or something. (Laughter) (Applause and cheers) Indeed, the economics are so favorable that even in the US, most new electric generation last year came from the sun and the wind.

05:38And the biggest growth was in the state of Texas, the home ground of big oil. But Trump and Russia and Saudi Arabia and a handful of other world powers may be able to slow that shift. America's Secretary of Energy, against all global evidence, has said there's no climate crisis, and we're not in the middle of an energy transition, either.

06:02So he's been subsidizing coal instead of embracing the clean energy that would, say, let us build any data centers we actually needed quickly and cheaply. As the Chinese have amply demonstrated, solar fields can sprout in a matter of weeks.

06:21America’s effort to delay this transition is not just economically stupid -- it also endangers the last, best hope of cooling this Earth. Sure, in 40 years, we will run the planet on sun and wind because it's cheap. But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, then the planet we run on sun and wind will be a broken planet.

06:42So those of us who hope for a different future need to fight for it. And with the cheap solar panel, we finally have a real weapon in that struggle. We need to push in every country and at every level of government for a faster move toward cheap, clean power.

06:59We started Sun Day in the US last year on the autumnal equinox across the nation, 500 events -- from solar-powered concerts to the installation of solar panels on Habitat for Humanity homes helped spread this new energy gospel. We'll do it again on the summer solstice in 2027, and this time we will do it globally.

07:23Days like this help us build the political power we need to push these things ahead. Americans, for instance, right now, pay three times what Europeans or Australians pay for solar power, mostly because of unnecessary bureaucracy at the state and local level.

07:43So Free the Rooftop is a cry that appeals to conservatives as much as liberals. Utah became the first American state last year to legalize small-scale plug-in solar, opening the door for the kind of simple installations that have sprouted on the balconies of millions of European apartments in the last three years.

08:03Maine and Virginia joined Utah last week. So yeah, as we push ahead with this work, we need to talk about its scientific necessity and its economic pragmatism. But we have one other ace to play, and that's the sheer beauty of power from the sun.

08:21We have a deep human connection to our local star. We don't know for sure how prehistoric people thought about things because, being prehistoric, they failed to write it down. But we do know that every pile of rocks they left behind, like Stonehenge, seems to point to the equinox or the solstice.

08:43Do you not break into an involuntary grin when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and hits you on the shoulder blades? If you don't get enough sun, you literally can get SAD -- seasonal affective disorder. So the mantra for this moment is clear: energy from heaven, not from hell.

09:05(Cheers and applause) And with that slogan, what a breakthrough moment this could be. I mean, humans have been burning things since the dawn of time. Darwin said language and fire were the two things that set our species apart. And fire was mostly good.

09:27We learned to cook, which gave us the big brain. We could move north and south from the equator. Anthropologists even think that eons of standing around the campfire every night helped explain some of the social bonds that mark our species.

09:41Think of it as a sort of primitive TED talk. (Laughter) When we learned to control the combustion of coal and oil and gas, that was the Industrial Revolution, and it gave us modernity. But now the cost of those fires has simply grown too high.

09:59The very future of the climate on which we depend is being overwhelmed by their smoke. So what sweet relief that in this exact moment, we can, if we want, put out those fires, the big ones in our power plants, the smaller ones in our furnaces and under the hoods of our cars.

10:19The sun already gives us light and warmth and, via photosynthesis, our supper. Now it is willing to provide us with all the power we could ever need. This gift has come at the last possible moment. It would be an extraordinary sin to waste it, and it would be a beautiful, beautiful project for humans to build it out across our hot and tired Earth in the next few years.

10:50In advance of your participation in that fight, let me just say, thank you. (Cheers and applause)