Chris Hayes Interview with Bill McKibben

Here Comes The Sun
Podcast on Youtube

If you missed Third Act with Bill McKibbon, we will send you the recording when we get it. McKibben was also interviewed by Chris Hayes this week and we have that recording on Youtube. Both programs invited McKibben to speak to his new book, Here Comes the Sun, and it is beyond compelling. McKibben explains the reason for the sudden spike worldwide in cheap, available renewable energy and the reaction from the fossil fuel industry trying to control the narrative, keeping the non-renewal energy lobbyists alive. Trump’s ongoing war with wind and solar power is clearly payment to fossil fuel industry executives.

Fortunately the podcast has a transcript, so I am able to share one of McKibben’s nuggets of information, and believe me, there are many. 

Excerpt from the podcast, Bill McKibben speaking:
“In most of the world, you just call up on a Monday and by Friday, you have solar panels on your roof and they’re pushing out entry. An even more remarkable example is what we call balcony solar.

This is for apartment dwellers who don’t have a rooftop. Across Europe in the last few years, millions of people, three million people in Germany have gone to the, whatever they call, Best Buy in Germany and picked up a solar panel that they can hang from their balcony with a standard plug coming off it that they plug into a socket in their wall. And it produces, in many cases, 20 or 25% of the energy that they’re using.

That’s illegal every place in this country, except, except, that progressive bash in the state of Utah, where the legislature earlier this spring, unanimously improved enabling legislation for balcony solar, because, as one libertarian senator rightly pointed out, why should the people of Frankfurt and Homburg be able to enjoy this thing and not the good people of Provo and Salt Lake City? And so now if you go on YouTube, there are a lot of videos of Utahns proudly hanging their solar panels off their balcony. We can make this stuff happen anyway.”