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Magazine|The Old Climate-Activism Playbook No Longer Works. What Else Can?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/magazine/climate-change-activism-renewable-energy.html
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At the end of a long dirt road through Vermont’s Green Mountains, Bill McKibben sat on his screened-in porch, surrounded by birdsong and the drone of buzzing insects. The July sun beat through a canopy of trees. McKibben sipped a cup of green tea and pointed outside, to the ground just past the edge of the house, where an array of solar panels tilted toward the late-morning sky. The roof, too, was loaded with panels of different vintages. “I’ve been putting them up at intervals for a quarter century,” he said.
Few climate activists have participated in more eras of the environmental movement than McKibben. In 1989, at age 27, he published “The End of Nature,” often described as the first book on global warming for lay readers, which became an international best seller. Then he turned to activism, eventually shifting his focus from combating the “greenhouse effect” to organizing pipeline protests and fossil fuel divestment campaigns. Over the decades, he has evolved from a concerned observer to an elder statesman of the climate movement.
I met McKibben at a uniquely bleak time for that movement. Republicans in Congress had shredded the Inflation Reduction Act, a Biden administration law meant in part to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and President Trump was making every effort to thwart progress on renewables while boosting the oil-and-gas industry. The president had also pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a climate accord that advocacy groups had helped catalyze. “In certain ways, it’s the darkest moment,” McKibben said.
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He’d been coping by throwing himself into a new project. On Sept. 21, McKibben will spearhead a national “day of action” called Sun Day, for which activists across the country are organizing local events to hype up solar power and energy-efficient innovations. There will be electric-car shows, open houses at all-electric solar homes and solar installation tours. In August, McKibben also published a book on solar and wind power called “Here Comes the Sun.” He wants to convince Americans that renewable energy is not a pricey, boutique alternative, but the accessible, abundant, cost-effective future of electrified life — no longer the Whole Foods of energy, as he put it, but the Costco.
With Sun Day, McKibben hopes to recapture the spirit of the first Earth Day, in 1970, the earliest wide-scale mobilization of the environmental movement, which helped catapult issues like pollution and conservation onto the national agenda. Like Earth Day, McKibben told me, Sun Day is meant to be “a giant potluck supper” for activists around the country: “We’ve set the date and the theme, and everyone’s bringing their own dish to the floor.”
