Bill McKibben’s China Syndrome

 Bill McKibben may be the highest-profile climate activist in America. For more than a decade, he has been campaigning against the hydrocarbon industry and proclaiming that the world doesn’t need — and shouldn’t use — coal, oil, and natural gas. He has also repeatedly claimed that the global economy can be fueled solely by wind and solar, if only there were sufficient political will to make that happen. He’s also declared that we should slash our use of coal, oil, and natural gas by a factor of 20, a move that would plunge the entire world into energy poverty.

I’ve known McKibben for a long time. I’ve debated him and debunked many of his claims. In 2023, I had him on the Power Hungry Podcast. I give him credit for his persistence and work ethic. As noted on his Amazon page, he’s written “more than 20 books.” And yes, he’s right: solar energy around the world is growing fast.

But the hard truth is that McKibben is an old-school huckster.

McKibben is equal parts P.T. Barnum, Amory Lovins, and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. He’s a constantly scolding climate catastrophist who blames the hydrocarbon sector for the impending doom he claims is now facing humanity. And he repeatedly praises the work of Mark Jacobson, the hyper-litigious Stanford professor who may be the most discredited academic in America.

 

McKibben’s latest book, Here Comes The Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, provides another example of the hucksterism that has made him famous. It’s also another example of his rank dishonesty. The book is a 220-page love letter to America’s most formidable geopolitical rival: the People’s Republic of China. McKibben is effusive in his praise of China’s pursuit of EVs, batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. But he blithely ignores China’s record as one of the world’s most notorious abusers of human rights. In particular, he makes only a passing mention of how dependent China’s solar sector is on the use of slavery in Xinjiang province, where numerous reports have determined that Uyghur Muslims are being enslaved to produce components for solar panels. Further, his book ignores the land-use conflicts over alt-energy that are raging all around the world. Finally, McKibben ignores the pesky problem of scale.

Here’s a quick debunking of McKibben’s latest silliness, with six charts.

I’ll start with China.

 

American climate activists like McKibben have long had an affinity for China and its alt-energy sector.

That affinity, in itself, is surreal given that China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. In addition, as I noted in these pages last month, China is now building some 227 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants. For reference, that new capacity now being built in China is larger than the entire existing US coal fleet, which currently has about 190 GW of capacity.

The climate claque made clear their desire to get cozy with China in July 2021, when about 40 US climate NGOs sent a letter to the White House and Congressional leaders urging them to work with China on a “new internationalism” based on “open sharing of green technologies” as well as “resource sharing and solidarity.”

As I explained in 2023, they called on Biden and “all members of Congress to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to US-China relations and instead prioritize multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis.” They went on: “China is the world leader in industrial capacity across a number of clean energy industries,” and that “working together could speed the transition away from dirty energy economies. It could also ensure that the countries and communities benefit from the local extraction of raw materials essential for clean energy supply chains.”

But here’s the truly astonishing fact: That letter, which was signed by 350 Action (McKibben was a founder of 350.org), Friends of the Earth, Earthworks, Sunrise Movement, Union of Concerned Scientists, and other groups, was sent two weeks after the US government banned the importation of solar materials tied to forced labor in Xinjiang.

As the New York Times reported on June 24, 2021, “The White House announced steps on Thursday to crack down on forced labor in the supply chain for solar panels in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, including a ban on imports from a silicon producer there...The action was notable given the Biden administration’s push to expand the use of solar power.”

Thus, by sending that letter, some of America’s most prominent climate NGOs made it clear that they care more about being pals with China and assuring access to its “clean energy supply chains” than they do about slavery in Xinjiang!

 

As seen above, the Biden administration issued a business advisory in July 2021 about the genocide in Xinjiang, and that advisory calls out the solar sector. Here’s the key section:

Forced Labor in the Solar Supply Chain in Xinjiang: The PRC dominates global solar supply chains, and mounting evidence indicates that solar products and inputs at nearly every step of the production process, from raw silicon material mining to final solar module assembly, are linked to known or probable forced labor programs. In 2020, PRC solar companies controlled 70% of the global supply for solar-grade polysilicon, and 45% was manufactured in Xinjiang. China also controls market shares of the downstream solar supply chain, including the production of wafers, solar cells, and solar panels. (Emphasis added.)

McKibben’s book contains just three mentions of Xinjiang. In one, McKibben notes that China opened its “largest solar farm yet in June 2024,” in Xinjiang, which is in western China. He goes on to say that the project is “3.5 GW, producing enough electricity to power all of Luxembourg...one more sign that the country is peaking its carbon emissions years ahead of schedule.”

McKibben makes a passing reference to this article in his book. But he doesn’t mention the genocide underway in Xinjiang, even though the article includes “genocide” in the headline. The article published in December 2024, written by Nithin Coca, with photos by Patrick Wack provides excellent reporting on China’s campaign of repression against the Uyghurs. Read it here.

From there McKibben makes only a passing reference to the repression in the region, quoting Rushan Abbas (McKibben doesn’t quote Abbas by name) a Uyghur-American activist who told the website Atmos, “I believe anyone who praises China’s pretentious commitment to green energy while failing to address the severe human rights abuses driving the industry, it amounts to complicity in the government’s crimes.”

The word “genocide” doesn’t appear in McKibben’s book. Not once. That’s a stunning fact given that the Atmos article he cites is titled “The World’s Largest Solar Plant Is Greenwashing China’s Uyghur Genocide.”

Glossing over the horrific situation in Xinjiang is simply inexcusable. It’s a sin of omission. Ignoring the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the role that slave labor plays in China’s solar sector shows that McKibben is not a journalist reporting the facts about the energy sector; he’s a climate activist promoting an agenda.

 

As seen above, the Biden administration provided another update on the situation in Xinjiang in 2023, including updates on the solar supply chain. Here’s the relevant section from that document:

The pervasiveness of forced labor programs in Xinjiang and co-mingling of solar-grade polysilicon supplies by downstream manufacturers raise concerns throughout the entire solar supply chain, and it is likely that absent more robust supply chain safeguards, reliable, enhanced auditing procedures, and continued midstream supply chain chokepoints that the majority of global solar products may continue to have a connection to forced labor and the XPCC. [XPCC is the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which has been sanctioned by the US government.] (Emphasis added.)

The stain of genocide on China’s solar industry is thoroughly documented. Numerous entities have reported on the situation in Xinjiang, including the BBC, Financial Times, and East Asia Forum, to name just a few. Last year, Amnesty International declared that China is “seeking to gaslight the global community, denying the scope and scale of violations of human rights documented in UN reports, while offering up its anti-human rights approach as a model for other countries.” Amnesty International continued:

Since 2018, different UN human rights bodies have raised concerns about China’s worsening human rights record, mirroring Amnesty International’s findings. In 2022, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found that, against a backdrop of restrictive and discriminatory laws, policy and practices, China’s actions targeting members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, I could provide many more examples of China’s scurrilous record in Xinjiang. But let’s move on.

McKibben casually dismisses the raging land-use conflicts around the growth of alt-energy, particularly those over farmland. His refusal to acknowledge the scale of the backlash against solar and wind projects is notable because he attacked me in the New Yorker in late 2022 for maintaining the Renewable Rejection Database. It’s important to note that at that time, the database listed about 505 rejections or restrictions of solar or wind energy in the US. Today, that number is 882. (I will be writing more on the Renewable Rejection Database over the next few days.)

Indeed, the backlash is global and growing. Just yesterday, in Ireland, the Laois and Kilkenny County Councils rejected a project that would have installed eight wind turbines standing 574 feet high. As one local media outlet noted, the project “has been the subject of sustained community opposition.”

Rather than recognizing the fierce opposition to these projects, McKibben, predictably, claims in his book that the “fossil fuel industry” is spreading “misinformation” about wind and solar projects in rural areas. He even belittles the notion that offshore wind projects could harm whales, saying that opponents to East Coast offshore wind projects are using “the endangered cetacean as a prop in their campaign.”

 

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There’s plenty of information available that illustrates the massive footprint needed to accommodate large amounts of solar and wind energy. As illustrated in the charts above, in 2023, Jesse Jenkins, a “macro-energy systems engineering expert” at Princeton, published an article in Mother Jones magazine in which he acknowledged that an “epic transition to clean energy” that aims to slash US greenhouse gas emissions to zero by relying heavily on solar and wind energy would require covering a land area equal to that of eight states, three states for solar and five for wind. Altogether, the projects would cover about 239,000 square miles.

That’s quite a footprint.

McKibben ignored Jenkins’ work. Instead, he turned to numbers produced by Jacobson. McKibben repeats Jacobson’s risible claim that the footprint for wind and solar is “about 0.17% of their territory.” In his book, McKibben cites Jacobson’s work 25 times. Remember, this is the same Mark Jacobson who sued his critics in federal court in 2017 for $10 million, claiming that they had defamed him by debunking some of his claims about renewable energy in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A short while after filing his claim, Jacobson suddenly withdrew the suit. When a federal court ordered him to pay the legal fees of the defendants — which totaled more than $500,000 — Jacobson sued Stanford University! (For more on Jacobson’s hijinks and that of another litigious climate-catastrophist academic, the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Mann, see my March 12, 2025, article, “SLAPPed.”)

Now, let’s talk about the challenge facing every form of alt-energy: scale.

The subtitle of McKibben’s book, “last chance for climate” implies that solar energy will rescue us from the ravages of catastrophic climate change. In his introduction, he claims that the “solar panel and the wind turbine are both the crucial machines and also the symbols of potential liberation.”

Except they aren’t.

 

As seen above, solar’s contribution to global energy supplies last year was just 8 exajoules, or 1.3% of global energy use. Hydrocarbon use was 64 times larger than that from solar. Thus, solar energy production could double, triple, or even jump by a factor of 10, and it still wouldn’t make a huge dent in global primary energy use, which today totals nearly 600 EJ.

 

Furthermore, despite the tsunami of hype coming from McKibben and others, the growth in solar and wind energy is not even matching the increase in natural gas use. Nor is it displacing large amounts of hydrocarbons. As seen above, in 2024, natural gas use grew 1.3 times faster than wind and solar combined. Meanwhile, hydrocarbon use grew nearly three times faster last year.

These numbers are easily obtained and verified by looking at the Statistical Review of World Energy. Why didn’t McKibben “do the math”? The answer is obvious: the math exposes the absurdity of his claims that solar is going to save us from climate change.

One final point.

In his book — as he has done throughout his career as a professional climate activist — McKibben casually dismisses the role that nuclear power must play in any serious decarbonization effort. His comments are telling and tiresome. In one passage, Chef McKibben says that along with geothermal energy, nuclear “may offer side dishes to the main course of sun, wind, and batteries.” At another point, he claims nuclear “continues to soak up enormous public subsidy.”

That’s a wind-turbine-size whopper. As I explained in 2023, the EIA’s own figures show that solar gets roughly 300 times more in federal tax subsidies per unit of energy than nuclear. Nevertheless, McKibben writes that the “prospect of atomic energy as a salvation is distractingly overhyped.”

That’s another silly claim, and it’s a good place to stop because if anyone on Planet Earth knows hype, it’s Bill McKibben.