The Ezra Klein Show devoted a long conversation to a claim that would have sounded like wishful thinking a few years ago: that clean power has quietly become the cheapest way to make electricity, not the virtuous but pricey option. The guest was Bill McKibben, a scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the climate group 350.org and of Third Act, and author of the recent book Here Comes the Sun. His framing is that solar, wind, and batteries have gone from what he calls the Whole Foods of energy to the Costco of energy: cheap, in bulk, and sitting on the shelf ready to go. The episode pairs that optimism with a blunt warning that the politics around it have gone the other way.
What makes the episode more than a pep talk is where McKibben plants the cost story. He points to the energy think tank Ember, which he says found in its spring global electricity review that solar met about three quarters of the growth in world electricity demand in 2025, that renewables passed a third of generation and overtook coal, and that fossil generation fell in China and India for the first time. He describes Australia handing out free power in the middle of the day because there is so much midday solar, prompting households to buy storage batteries and shift appliances to the afternoon, and California running for stretches on more than 100 percent clean electricity, with batteries carrying the grid after dark. The outside marker worth adding is policy direction. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the United States law McKibben credits for the recent build-out, is the backdrop here, and this conversation lands as Washington moves to unwind much of it while most of the rest of the world keeps building.
According to the show, the more striking stories are outside the usual map. McKibben describes rooftops across Pakistani cities filling with cheap imported panels bought by households tired of unreliable grid power, a build-out he says happened without a government program, with buyers learning to wire them from videos online. He names the Philippines as the next fast adopter. On the consumption side he keeps returning to a short list he calls the trinity: the electric vehicle or e-bike, the heat pump, and the induction cooktop. He also makes a political argument about power itself, contending that fuels concentrated in a few places hand outsized leverage to whoever controls them, while sunlight and wind are spread everywhere. He points to the Vatican, which he says is moving to run on solar, and offers a line he wants the movement to adopt: energy from heaven, not from hell. His blunter thesis is that the main obstacle left is the political power of the fossil fuel industry rather than any missing technology, which is why, he argues, the industry has fought so hard against a transition that now makes economic sense on its own.
The episode does not stay sunny. McKibben spends real time on the other half of the ledger, arguing the climate is changing faster than expected. He raises the risk to the Atlantic currents that keep Europe temperate, citing scientists who now put meaningful odds on large-scale disruption in the decades ahead, and points to an intensifying El Nino and record heat as near-term warnings. His framing is that the technology has arrived just as the physical stakes climb, so speed is the scarce resource. He also nods to history, recalling that a United States president once put solar panels on the White House before a successor removed them, and argues the country handed a technological lead it invented to competitors abroad.
Bottom line: The cost argument is real and mostly won, and McKibben is right that the interesting question has shifted from whether clean energy works to why politics keeps fighting it. Where the optimism gets thin is the grid: transmission, permitting, and storage are the unglamorous parts he mostly waves past, and they are exactly where build-outs stall. Watch this one if you only ever track EV spec sheets, because the bigger shift is happening a layer up, in what it now costs to make an electron. Just keep the pom-poms in check, because the same episode that celebrates the tech spends its back half explaining how fragile the climate it is racing to save has become.
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