>> It's China that's become the world's first electrostate.

They're learning how to use that flood of cheap, clean energy to run everything around them.

[MUSIC] >> Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are talking about energy.

The kind that powers our homes, fuels our economies, increasingly defines our politics.

For decades now, fossil fuels have powered the global economy.

Control the flow of oil and gas, you control the future.

But that's quickly changing as renewable energy surges around the world.

In the last three years, solar and wind generation has grown so quickly that this is now the fastest energy transition in human history.

Yet just as the rest of the world goes all in on clean energy, the United States is taking its foot off the gas, or should I say, unplugging the solar batteries.

Does it risk falling behind?

Joining me to talk about what a world powered by the sun might actually look like, Bill McKibben.

He's an environmentalist, an activist and author of the new book, Here Comes the Sun.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

Oh, you're not gonna believe who's calling me again.

Yep, you guessed it.

Let me call you back, okay?

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And-- [MUSIC PLAYING] In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter was facing a national energy crisis.

To jumpstart America's clean energy transition, he issued tax credits.

He created the Department of Energy.

And on a sunny day in June 1979, he installed solar panels on the White House roof, sending a message-- the future is renewable.

By the end of this century, I want our nation to derive 20% of all the energy we use from the sun.

We will build a more self-reliant and a more secure nation for the generations to come.

President Ronald Reagan had other ideas.

Pushing deregulation and fiscal conservatism, he decided cheap oil was a better bet than a costly experiment.

His administration ended Carter's clean energy incentives and in 1986, removed the solar panels.

Today, the White House is once again rolling back its predecessor's climate agenda.

The Trump administration has canceled subsidies for renewable projects, lifted drilling restrictions on federal land, and is pressuring allies to buy more American oil and gas.

So is history repeating itself?

Not quite.

A lot has changed.

First, there's economics.

Since the 1970s, renewable costs have dropped by 99%.

Sun and wind are now the cheapest form of power almost everywhere.

Fossil fuels have become an increasingly expensive habit.

That's why Texas, oil country, not exactly Greenpeace headquarters, leads the United States in clean energy generation.

And why Saudi Arabia, the kingdom of crude, wants half of its energy from renewables by 2030.

When Riyadh is diversifying, you know the math has changed.

Then there's the climate.

In the 1980s, climate change was an abstract idea.

Today, of course, it is reality.

Extreme weather becomes less of a partisan issue when it knocks out your power grid or burns down your home or floods your neighborhood.

And then finally, there's geopolitics.

Fossil fuel dependence is a national security liability.

Europe learned that the hard way when Russia cut off its gas supply after the Ukraine invasion.

The US has fought multiple wars in the Middle East to keep the oil flowing.

Renewables are immune from price gouging, from sanctions.

They're not held in deposits within borders.

You can't embargo the sun.

No one controls the wind.

The rest of the world is increasingly all in.

India just hit its goal of generating half its power from renewables five years early.

Between January and May, China added enough solar and wind power to generate as much electricity as Turkey or Indonesia.

Now Beijing still burns enormous amounts of coal, but it's also betting bigger than anyone else on the energy technologies that will dominate the rest of the century.

So yes, new U.S. policies may slow progress, but they aren't stopping the global momentum.

And yes, fossil fuels will still factor in the switch to renewables for decades to come, but the question is no longer if the world will transition, it's how fast, and what role the United States will play in shaping it.

Joining me to talk about the stakes and the scale of this moment, environmentalist and author Bill McKibben.

Bill McKibben, welcome to GZERO World.

It's very good to be with you.

A lot of the people that are talking about global climate are in various degrees of despondence, not enough money being spent and committed, not moving fast enough, people not taking it seriously.

Your latest book, you are striking more of a note of optimism.

Explain to our audience how that came to be.

Well, unusual for me because my general role in the world is a professional bummer-outer of other people.

I wrote the first book about climate change back in the 1980s.

And there is much to be bummed out about.

The planet really is unraveling in real time ecologically.

So I have more than enough things to keep me awake at night.

But there is one big good thing simultaneously happening on the planet, big enough that it might address at least some of both our climate crisis and our democracy crisis.

And that is the sudden, unexpected, and overwhelming surge in renewable energy across the planet.

This is the fastest energy transition the world has ever seen.

The last 36 months, which is really when it's taken place, have happened so dramatically that I think in many cases we kind of have missed the story just by the speed that it's happening.

But just to give you an example of what's going on, in China in May, which is the last month for which we have good data, they were putting up three gigawatts of solar power a day.

Now a gigawatt's the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant.

So they were building the solar equivalent of one of those every eight hours.

In California, the only part of our country that's taken this most seriously.

They reached some kind of tipping point in the last 10 months or so.

Now, most days, California supplies more than 100% of its power for long periods from clean energy.

At night, when the sun goes down, the biggest source of supply to the grid is batteries that didn't exist three years ago.

California, fourth largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas to make electricity than they were two years ago.

That's the kind of number applied globally that begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets.

And remember, every tenth of a degree moves another hundred million people out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one.

I'm not telling you that we're going to stop global warming.

I'm just telling you we finally have a scalable way to attack.

We're already well into global warming.

I'm not trying to get you to make that argument.

My understanding, obviously, renewable energy, part of the reason why so much more is being done and the investments are growing is because the costs are coming down.

And I mean, this is an area where everything we see, the technology is improving dramatically at scale, where that doesn't seem to be the case with fossil fuels.

They don't seem to be getting particularly cheaper or much more advanced.

Is that still the case?

- You're absolutely right.

And what it highlights is the difference in kind between these two things.

Fossil fuel is a resource and it gets harder to get over time.

You have to go further back in the coal mine to find some more coal.

Renewable energy is the opposite.

It's basically, the resource is basically human intelligence.

You get better at building the infrastructure to catch the sun's rays.

Every time we double the amount of solar power on the planet, we drop the price in half.

And that learning curve seems to be going, if anything, faster than ever right now.

It's an extraordinary gift.

And that learning curve passed, crossed the line sometime five years ago or so, where it became cheaper to do this than to burn stuff.

We live on a planet that we haven't really let it sink in yet.

We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

Now, when I look at the International Energy Agency and other similar organizations over the past 10, 20 years, they have consistently underestimated how quickly we are going to see an expansion of renewables because they're doing straight line estimates and they're not taking into account these technological improvements.

If you take into account the technological improvements and you put your crystal ball in front of you, Bill, how long before you believe a majority of the planet's energy is coming from post-carbon renewable sources?

If we do all that we can, by at least the middle of the next decade, maybe sooner.

But that said, there are forces trying to keep us from getting there, and they're most prominent in the United States, where under the Trump administration, we're now all but banning solar and especially wind power.

You know, we just shut down big, almost completed wind farms off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

So there's a real fight underway here.

And your question is really the key question, because if we're worried about climate change, pace is the thing that matters most.

Thirty years from now, I have no doubt that we're going to run the planet on sun and wind simply because of economics.

But if it takes us anything like 30 years to get there, then the planet we run on sun and wind is going to be a broken planet.

We're already seeing huge damage everywhere.

What's the gap?

I mean, if it takes you, because you said it might be the middle if we do what we can, it might be the middle of the next decade, but it might be 30 years.

So we're talking about, you know, a gap of, let's say, 20 years or 15 years.

What's the difference, your estimate, in what that means for peak temperature rise on the planet, the delta between those two outcomes?

Right now, the trajectory that we're on at the moment takes us to 3 degrees Celsius in the course of this century.

So our job is to cut that back as much as we can.

The deeper question, an even harder question to answer is, what's the delta in damage?

Because once we go past certain tipping points, the absolute temperature gets less important.

I mean, the questions we have to be asking ourselves is, are things like, is the Arctic still intact?

Or is it melted so much, which we're beginning to see now, that things like the jet stream are profoundly affected?

So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us a couple of years ago, that if we wanted to stay on anything like the trajectory that we'd set out in Paris 10 years ago, we needed to cut emissions in half by 2030.

2030, by my watch, is now four years and four months away.

But now we have a technology that allows us to at least think about how we might move in that direction.

And you can watch it starting to happen in China.

China, which has embraced this wholeheartedly, embraced what, remember, is an American technology.

I mean, the first solar cell was built in Edison, New Jersey, in 1954.

The first commercial wind turbine was 30 miles south of my house in Vermont in the 1940s.

But it's China that's become the world's first electrostate.

And it's not just that they're great at now building fast, big solar and wind installations.

It's that they're learning how to use that flood of cheap, clean energy to run everything around them.

The best example, of course, is e-vehicles and e-bikes.

Half the cars sold in China last month came with the plug hanging out the back.

And that's quickly, quickly defining the automotive market, especially for the developing world.

We think Detroit is the center of the automotive world, but actually it's three cities in China whose names are hard to pronounce.

Absolutely.

I take no issue with what you're saying about how much China has invested, and is planning to continue to invest in these technologies.

I do see, though, that China continues to also build a lot of additional coal plants.

And, I mean, when I look at artificial intelligence and China's data centers, which are going to be incredibly energy thirsty, best estimates I get from people that understand this is that most of that AI is going to be powered in China by coal, and in the United States, it's going to come from gas.

So what do we do about that?

I think probably not, in the case of China anyway.

They build some new coal capacity, but they're actually burning less coal than they did.

And the coal is the second or third tier power that they go to if they're run short of solar or wind, because it's more expensive.

So those plants are idle a lot of the time.

Now in the US, if we're going to go ahead with building big data centers, and I guess it looks like we are, despite the fact that I think it's pretty unclear just how valuable that technology is turning out to be.

If we're gonna do it, the only way we can do it is to build them with sun and wind.

You can't build fast enough to keep up with the pace of those things.

And that's what we're finding out in this country this year.

The price of electricity is up 10% across America so far in 2025.

That's because we have an increase in demand from things like data centers, and we've artificially constrained the supply because the president has said we're not going to build sun and wind.

So, I mean, look, you don't have to be a Nobel Prize economist to know that if demand goes up and you constrain supply, price is going to be the place where that makes a difference.

It's why I think that eventually we will blink here and start building renewable energy fast because if we don't, well, I mean if we don't, then 10 years from now the U.S. will be the colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion, where those tourists who can still get a visa come to gawk at how people used to live in the olden days, you know.

But I think before that we will blink because we'll figure out that we can't really have a competitive economy if our major input, energy, costs more than everybody else's.

Now, you've said, you talked about California as a place that has continued to embrace a lot of this transition.

Texas, of course, which produces a lot of fossil fuels, but Texas has also been a leader in the United States for renewable energy.

So, I mean, now a lot of people that vote in Texas vote for Trump.

How is it that the United States is turning against an energy that so many Texans are making money out of and working it?

So Texas is such an interesting case because you're right, they're now the fastest growing part of the clean energy economy in this country.

The Texans are doing it because they have a wide open market and because they need the grid stability that comes with renewables and batteries.

The fossil fuel industry has tried to use its weight in the Texas legislature to stop that.

They had a series of bills this spring, the most important of which people started calling DEI for natural gas because it would have required people who wanted to put up five megawatts of solar to also put up five megawatts of gas.

Everybody thought it would pass because of the power of the oil industry, but in fact people started coming out of the woodwork, especially from rural Texas, to Austin saying, "Don't do this.

This is how we pay the school taxes in our town.

This is the way we keep the old folks' home open.

This is the center of our economy.

Don't do this."

And the legislature walked away from it and passed none of those bills, and so it'll be fascinating to see.

The head of the Energy Reliability Council of Texas earlier this summer said, "We're not going to have any more blackouts the way we've had in past years in Texas.

The chances of them are greatly reduced because of this flood of clean energy and the batteries that store it."

Batteries are going down in price just as fast as solar panels and wind turbines, and they're the key part of this.

I mean, essentially, they mean that the sun shines all day.

We've talked a lot about the United States and China.

So far, that's been it in terms of geographies.

The Europeans, for a very long time, have been talking the best talk about the need to move to transition energy, and yet the growth isn't there.

The investments aren't close to the size of what we see in China.

Lord knows they're not as advanced technologically.

Why not?

Where did they go wrong?

There's actually been in the last two years just an explosion of renewable energy across Europe.

A lot of it triggered by the invasion of Ukraine when people suddenly realized that they couldn't rely on cheap natural gas from Russia henceforth.

And so it's happened at every level.

I mean there are parts of the EU Spain and Portugal that produce prodigious amounts of clean energy.

Britain closed down its last coal fired power plant last fall and replaced it with a renewable energy park.

The wind from the North Sea is going to be their ticket going forward.

Germany, nobody's ever gone to Germany for a beach vacation that I know of, but they're one of the leading solar companies, countries on earth.

And it's not just big solar fields.

They do it at every scale.

One of the most remarkable things about Germany that's spread across Europe in the last two years is what we're calling balcony solar.

This is for apartment dwellers.

You go to whatever they call Best Buy in Stuttgart, and you come home with, for a few hundred euros, a solar panel designed not to go on the roof, but just to hang over the railing of your apartment balcony.

And it just has a plug that you plug into the wall.

No electricians, no rewiring, nothing.

Often provides 25% of the power that a household is using.

And what does that cost?

What does it cost to buy that?

400 euros, 500 euros.

What are things that you do that are kind of forward and future oriented on climate that most people would find common sense if they thought about it?

You personally.

So we've had solar panels on my house for a quarter century and they work fantastic.

The solar panels have a plug that cord that goes to my EV in the garage through an inverter.

And every night when I get home, I plug it in and overnight it fills up with inexpensive electricity off the roof.

The heat pump in our house is way better than the furnace we used to have in the basement, cheaper to run, quieter, produces heat and cooling by taking the latent heat in the atmosphere around us and using some electricity to amplify it.

I'm the cook in our house, so for years I've been using induction cooktop in the kitchen, $60 from Amazon for an induction cooktop.

It boils water twice as fast as the open flame we used to have and probably just as important since we have a young grandchild now.

Kids raised in homes with gas in the kitchen get about twice as likely to get asthma, which if you think about it for a little while, makes sense.

You've got an open campfire in your kitchen.

The future that we could be having is remarkable at the smallest level in your home, but it's also remarkable at the largest level.

I mean, just think for a minute what the geopolitics of the world would have been like over the last 70 years if oil was of relatively trivial value.

How much would we have, how many fewer wars and coups and assassinations and terrorist plots and everything would we have endured if we ran the world on an energy source, sun and wind, that's available to everyone everywhere, that can't be hoarded or held in reserve, that's just there?

I'm not trying to sound utopian.

I'm not utopian about any of this, but I think that there's a real chance to put the world on a sounder footing than the one it's on now.

Bill McKibben, happy Sunday to you.

Many, many thanks.

What a good pleasure to talk with you.

Now we move from a world powered by wind and sun to one powered by your hands.

It's time for "Puppet Regime."

Anyway, President Xi, thank you again for a really lovely week in Beijing.

It was very special to hold your hand like that.

Uh-huh.

Nah, don't worry about my phone charger.

I left it.

I'll just buy a new one.

It's okay.

It's... Oh.

(laughs) You're not gonna believe who's calling me again.

Yep, you guessed it.

Let me call you back, okay?

Okay.

Hello?

- Hello, Vladimir.

It's time again, deadline time.

I am once again asking you very strongly to end the war in Ukraine.

No.

>> Darn it.

So, same time again next week?

Puppet Regime.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you've discovered your own infinite energy resource, why don't you tell us about it?

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, health care and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... ♪♪