Bill McKibben’s Far-Too-Sunny Outlook for Solar Power

We can also, theoretically, create wormhole shortcuts through space-time. But that doesn’t mean we can actually do it, never mind by 2050. Even those forms of electrification within reach will require an unprecedented build-out of grids and lithium-ion batteries, currently the most efficient way to store and transport renewable electricity. These batteries will, in turn, require excavating millions of tons of heavy metals, notably nickel, copper, and, not least, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo. While expressing “no small sympathy for those who groan at the [prospect of] yet more mining,” he defends the renewables mining scramble by calling climate displacement “the greatest colonizing scheme of all time”:

We should work hard to temper the tragedies that come with every kind of extraction. But we don’t live in a fair world—we live in a world that’s very rapidly tipping toward hell, a hell that will be hardest on precisely the people with the least power. Only moving fast can head off that hell, but moving fast means, inevitably, carelessness. It’s a hard call; I’m so scared of the climate crisis that I may bend too far.

McKibben also may bend too far in his assurances that we “have the stuff” necessary to build the panels, grid infrastructure, and batteries required by the renewable program. “We may be a little short of tellurium, but I predict we’ll find it,” he writes. He quotes a 2023 study—whose lead author, Seaver Wang, directs the Climate and Energy program at the Breakthrough Institute—purporting to show that the crucial minerals needed for net-zero “do not exceed geological reserves,” but omits countervailing research, such as a 2024 Cornell-University of Michigan study that found just one of those crucial minerals—copper—cannot be mined fast enough to electrify the United States, never mind the planet.

In 2007, just one year before he launched 350.org, McKibben published a bio-regionalist tract called The Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, which challenged the scale and ideology of the growth-oriented consumer economy that has propelled humanity into a state of overshoot. In it, he laced into “tech-driven high-growth economics” as an “empire of the mind” that “allowed us to avoid hard choices” and ignored the basic biophysical reality that “we do not have the energy needed to keep the magic [of growth] going.” That book is not an outlier in his corpus, but one of several that understand our civilization’s problem as less a matter of transplanting its viscera than of taming its hormone glands and conquering its addictions.