The
first Sun Day was celebrated on May 3, 1978, when Jimmy
Carter was President. It was proposed by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) and Rep.
Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), then President. Carter threw his support behind it.
Before that first Sun Day, Carter created the Department of Energy and pushed tax
breaks for clean energy in 1977. Two years later, he famously put solar panels
on the White House roof, calling them a symbol of America’s future.
Sadly,
Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan, and during his two
terms, Reagan gutted the renewable energy programs, killed the tax incentives,
and in 1986 had Carter’s solar panels removed from the White House.
The
promoters of Sun Day 2025 hope to revitalize what Carter started nearly fifty
years ago.
Sun
Day 2025 will be celebrated on September 21, the day before
the autumnal equinox. Bill McKibben has been the primary proponent of Sun Day
2025, and his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the
Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, was released less than a month
ago.
McKibben
(b. 1960) is widely known as one of the leaders in the founding of 350.org in
2008. It quickly became the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change
movement.**
Nearly
ten years earlier, McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the earliest
warnings about climate change. That book of “dark realism” helped establish
McKibben as a leading voice in environmental activism long before he founded
350.org.
Now,
though, McKibben says on the first page of his new book, “for the first time I
can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun.” He concludes his Introduction
with these words: “Our species, at what feels like a very dark moment, can take
a giant leap into the light. Of the sun.”
So,
Sun Day 2025 especially stresses the importance of solar energy, although wind
energy is also acknowledged.
Solar
energy is widely considered the best form of clean energy
when factoring in both cost and limitless availability.
Regarding
cost, solar photovoltaic (the term that describes the process of converting
light directly into electrical voltage) is now less than half that of producing
electricity by fossil fuels. For homeowners, solar panels drop electricity
bills to near, or even below, zero during the hot summer months.**
Not
only is there an outstanding cost advantage, there is also an unlimited supply
of solar energy. The sun delivers more energy to Earth in one hour than
humanity uses in a year, and scientists indicate that that will continue to be
true for the next five billion years.
Moreover,
solar energy produces no negative impact on the environment. There are no
emissions of harmful substances, and neither is there any noise pollution. In
addition, there is minimal land disruption compared to wind farms (windmills/turbines
used for wind power).
Finally,
solar systems are quick to install, scalable (=easily able to be changed in
size or scale) from rooftops to utility-scale farms, and increasingly paired
with battery storage to provide power even when the sun isn’t shining. What
could be better than energy that is cheap, clean, abundant, and scalable?
Have
you taken the “giant leap into the light” that McKibben wrote about? If not,
isn’t now the time to do so? Indeed, we all need to latch on to this “last
chance for the climate” and this “fresh chance for civilization.”
_____
**
The name
350.org comes from McKibben’s view that
the world will not be safe from global warming unless the concentration of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls to 350 parts per million or below.
**
My wife and I had
solar panels installed on our house in 2019. This year, our electricity bills
for the summer months of June, July, and August combined showed that we were
given more than $26.50 of “overgeneration credit.” Thus, rather than paying
high electricity bills for air conditioning in addition to normal year-round
charges, we were paid for producing more electricity than we used. (Here
is a link to “Let’s Go Solar!”, the blog article I posted in February 2019.)
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