Here Comes the Sun: How Bill McKibben Is Turning Solar Momentum into a Movement

Photo by Donny O’Neill

Mark your calendar: on September 21, Sun Day will rally communities worldwide to celebrate and accelerate the clean energy revolution.

Sun Day, a new worldwide day of action, will showcase everything from solar-powered concerts and EV parades to rooftop solar open houses and community rallies, with the goal of making clean energy visible, accessible, and impossible to ignore.

It’s an effort fueled by rare optimism from one of the climate movement’s most persistent voices. Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author, has been sounding the climate alarm for decades. But ask him what gives him hope in 2025, and his answer is surprisingly optimistic.

“Everything’s going wrong on planet Earth right now, except for one thing: we’re finally seeing the very, very rapid growth of clean energy,” McKibben says. “Solar power is growing faster around the world, not only than anything else right now, but than anything else ever.”

That momentum is staggering. It took nearly 70 years—from 1954 to 2022—to install the first terawatt of solar panels. The second terawatt came in just two years, and the third will arrive in about 15 months.

“The Chinese are putting up the equivalent of coal-fired power plants’ worth of solar panels every eight hours,” he adds. “In California, the fourth-largest renewable economy in the world, natural gas use for electricity has dropped 40% in just two years. In 40 years of doing this work, that might be the most optimistic statistic I’ve heard.”

For someone who’s spent a lifetime working on the climate crisis, that’s no small shift in tone. “I’ve had the dubious privilege of thinking about climate change longer than almost anybody,” McKibben says. “That’s been a dark job, but in the last few years, the excitement of seeing the explosion of renewable energy…has begun to show up in the volumes that we know we’ve needed for decades.”

It’s that rare optimism and the desire to share it that sparked the idea for Sun Day, a global day of action taking place September 21, the autumn equinox. “To be able to say, ‘Here’s an important thing that’s going right and that we can build to make more things go right’—that’s a privilege, and I’m enjoying it as we head towards Sun Day,” McKibben notes.

The mission of Sun Day is to reframe solar and wind not as “alternative” energy, but as the obvious, common-sense choice. “We’ve spent 40 years calling it that, and it’s stuck in a little corner of our brain as some kind of fringe thing,” he says. “In fact, power from the sun and wind is now the obvious mainstream, common-sense way to do things.”

The fossil fuel industry, he warns, is working hard to keep us “hooked to their antiquated and archaic way of setting stuff on fire to power our lives.” Sun Day aims to push back through changing local regulations that slow rooftop solar adoption, pressuring utility commissions to fast-track solar farms, and shifting the public’s sense of what’s possible.

“This isn’t the Whole Foods of energy—nice but pricey,” McKibben says. “Instead, this is the Costco of energy—cheap, available in bulk, on the shelf, and ready to go.”

A Global Day with Local Power

On Sun Day, McKibben says there will be hundreds of events from solar-powered concerts to EV and e-bike parades, open houses showcasing heat pumps and rooftop solar, and peaceful protests against new fossil fuel infrastructure. The diversity is intentional, and it is a decentralized wave of creativity, united by a single theme.

“At some point in the day, I hope everybody shades their eyes a little bit and just looks up towards the sun and is grateful for the fact that we get to share its bounty,” he says. “We’re on a planet that’s absolutely bathed in energy, and we need to stop wasting it and start putting it to use.”

Numbers can prove the case for renewables, but McKibben believes it’s stories and visibility that make people believe in them. “Environmentalists have done a good job of appealing to the part of the brain that likes bar graphs and pie charts, but not as well at the more visceral part,” he says.

Sun Day’s hands-on demonstrations and public displays show that renewable technology is neither exotic nor difficult. “In fact, they’re far better than the things that they replace,” McKibben says.

This kind of visibility, he adds, bridges political divides. “Some people have this idea that their home is their castle, but once you’ve got solar panels up on your roof, then it really is your castle, and nobody can come bother you. Whereas others feel that we’re connecting ourselves with the groovy power of the sun. We can work across those kinds of divides.”

Success won’t be measured in headlines alone. “I hope everyone will come away feeling we’ve done a small thing to advance the most important movement of our time,” McKibben says. “The aim is to make these conversations easier, build political pressure, and change a thousand city halls, county commissions, and state public utility boards.”

How The Outdoor State Can Get Involved

The outdoor industry has everything to lose and everything to gain in the climate fight. “There is not going to be much outdoor recreation in a world that’s always catching on fire and flooding, and where winter is turned into one long mud season,” McKibben says.

That reality is why he sees POW and the broader Outdoor State as natural allies, not only in raising alarms but also in celebrating solutions. “POW is especially good at telling not only the stories of what’s going wrong…but also the stories about what’s going right,” he says.

For Sun Day, McKibben imagines POW athletes and advocates climbing walls or summiting peaks with mini solar panels strapped to their packs or Sun Day signs waving in the wind, creating images that fuse adventure with action and make climate solutions feel both urgent and exhilarating. “It needs to be clear that this is good for the environment, it’s good for your pocketbook, but also fun,” he says.

Because in the end, McKibben reminds us, the sun offers more than clean energy; it offers joy. “We’ve got to do this for all the pragmatic and utilitarian reasons we can muster, but it’ll be a beautiful thing as well.” 

On September 21, whether you’re leading an event or simply stepping outside to feel the warmth on your face, you’ll be part of a global movement looking up, toward the most abundant source of energy our planet will ever know.

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Author: Stacie Sullivan

Stacie always knew she wanted to pursue a career in the ski industry from a young age, having first clicked into skis at the age of 4 and writing her 8th grade career project on being a professional skier. While her dreams of becoming a professional athlete didn’t quite pan out the way she planned at […]