Here Comes the Sun

A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

By: Bill McKibben

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

From the acclaimed environmentalist, a call to harness solar power and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future.

Every eighteen hours, the world puts up a nuclear power plant's–worth of solar panels. At the same time, combustion continues to melt our poles, poison our bodies, and drive our global inequality. And it is no longer necessary: For the first time in 700,000 years, we know how to catch the sun’s rays and convert them into energy.

In Here Comes the Sun, world-renowned author Bill McKibben tells the story of our sudden spike in power from the sun and wind. McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy, which, if it accelerates, gives us a chance not just to limit climate change’s damage, but to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. Getting there means overcoming obstacles like Big Oil, but McKibben sees a chance for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.

©2025 Bill McKibben (P)2025 Highbridge Audio

Essential reading

Charts a path forward that’s actually doable. The most optimistic book about climate change I’ve encountered.

This book offers an important update on how incredibly affordable solar and wind energy has become. Read it...take action.

As an architect and planner, I thought I knew a lot about solar. Now I realize I was not up to speed on what's changed in just the past couple of years.

It's right there above us.

An excellent account of the power of the sun to enrich the lives of everyone on the planet. A very ind

Enthusiastic yet important

McKibben demonstrates that we can indeed solve the worsening of the climate crisis through the use of solar power.

For those who don’t know all the essential details, a necessary listen. For those of us who do, a necessary encouragement.

Please listen and learn

Listen carefully. Learn a lot. Take it very seriously. Take immediate urgent action and convince others to do the same. God help us if we don’t.

A Great book

This is one of the most enjoyable and also encouraging books I’ve read in a long time. The prose is always clear, approachable, informative and lively. The narrators voice quality is superb.

The message? Solar energy is taking over and offers a bright future even as it rearranges geopolitics and threatens entrenched stakeholders who have done what they can do to slow its momentum.

Power, the source of energy we use to get work done defines and colors *power* relationships: how we are ruled, what freedoms we have, how the global order works. Fossil fuels chained us all to a certain, in some ways bleak arrangement from which solar promises to free us. Economic and technological forces are on our side, as you’ll happily learn from the book.

His lack of knowledge about the technology he talks about and the lack of understanding basic physics.

He has zero hands on experience in the field he speaks of. He has never been anything but an activist and has made himself a millionaire off of fear mongering. He a unhealthy hatred towards Exon as if Exon is the only petrochemical company.