The Dartmouth Climate Collaborative and house communities co-hosted a March 3 talk by author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, bringing together students, faculty, and staff as he warned about the dire consequences of a changing climate but also touted advances in clean energy being made around the world.
“The last three years on this planet have been the three hottest years that we’ve ever recorded. And if recent predictions that we’re entering into a new El Niño sometime between July and September prove out, there’s very little doubt that 2027 will become the hottest year we’ve ever recorded on this planet,” McKibben told more than 100 students and community members in Filene Auditorium. “That will bring a whole new level of chaos and craziness to the planet’s systems.”
The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. With several Middlebury students, he founded the global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org.
In the near future, climate scientists predict more floods, wildfires, and intolerable heat, creating economic instability and widespread health crises.
Yet amid those grim realities, McKibben sees powerful rays of hope.
“And that is the very, very rapid spread of clean energy,” he said. “About five years ago, we passed an invisible line where it became cheaper to produce power from the sun and the wind than from burning things—coal, gas, oil.” Over-reliance on fossil fuels, he warned, “will take down our civilizations if we’re not able to slow down the pace at which we are warming.”
Fortunately, he said, that slowdown has begun, thanks to solar collectors being rapidly constructed around the globe.
“The last 36 months have been a revelation, because this stuff that, my whole lifetime, we’ve called alternative energy, turns out not to be the alternative anymore,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of new electric generation around the world came from sun and wind. We don’t notice that immediately because it’s mostly headquartered in China…and the pace at which they’re doing it is truly staggering.”
China is not alone in reducing its carbon footprint, McKibben said, noting that Pakistani farmers used 35% less diesel fuel last year than they had before; the number of solar panels grew by more than 50% last year across Africa; and in Cuba, solar power is also on a rapid upswing.
In the U.S., he lamented, current policies on the federal level are moving in the opposite direction, encouraging more, not less dependence on fossil fuels. But some states, he said, including California, Texas, and Utah, are bucking that trend.
“In California, the biggest source of supply to the grid are batteries that spent the afternoon soaking up excess sunshine,” he said. “Those batteries didn’t exist three years ago in California, and this is a really wild number: California uses 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they did two years ago.”
Europeans, he said, are also making measurable strides, both large and small.
“You go to whatever you call Best Buy in Italy, and for a few hundred euros you come home with a solar panel, not to be put on the roof, but to be hung over a balcony railing. And on the back is a plug, just a normal plug that you plug into the wall, no electrician needed, producing 20-to-25 percent of the power that an apartment uses.”
Such technological advances are raising McKibben’s hopes for the future.
“We’ve been given a kind of way out—not all the way out, but a little of the way out—of the worst problem, the worst crisis that our species has ever confronted,” he said. “And it would be an absolute sin not to grab it with both hands and figure out how to make it work.”
Asked by Ariana Thornton ’29 if he was concerned that China is taking the lead internationally in solar energy production, McKibben answered, “This is American technology, and we have handed it over to the Chinese. And we should be outraged by it because the technological and economic future and with it, a lot of political hegemony has been ceded to China.”
On the other hand, he added, “given the fix that we’re in with the climate, I think we’re going to have to be happy that the Chinese are at least developing this. And I don’t worry that much about the hold that it gives the Chinese over politics.”
Maya Beauvineau ’26, who said she is involved in Dartmouth’s Energy Justice Clinic, asked McKibben about the mining of critical minerals for solar energy production and about whether large-scale renewables are being implemented, in some locations, in ways that replicate environmental harms of conventional energies.
“Large scale wind energy is causing some real concerns for Indigenous communities in Chile because of the scale of the development and because it’s being developed by transnational companies on lands that often are important carbon sinks and important sources of water, like bogs and native forest,” said Beauvineau.
“There’s no argument for doing this stupidly,” McKibben replied. “But the benefit of the doubt should in every case be to build this stuff out as fast as we can, because if we don’t, then the world that we’re producing is hard on everyone, but hardest by far on the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet. That’s who dies in floods and fires and droughts.”
McKibben’s talk was followed by a dinner discussion co-hosted by the Climate Collaborative and the house communities focused on opportunities for student learning and action on climate across campus. As part of the dinner discussion, the Climate Collaborative welcomed ideas for integrating climate studies in the curriculum and means for students to be involved in extracurricular programs and action. They announced a new Climate Collaborative Student Advisory Group to help guide priorities moving forward, and encouraged students interested in participating to apply. The advisory group is also open to professional and graduate students.
“No matter what disciplinary focus you have, we want you to be able to depart Dartmouth with an expertise in climate interest and engagement,” Meredith Kelly, a professor of earth sciences and faculty director of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative, told students in the audience. “This is what makes Bill McKibben’s visit so inspiring.”
The Climate Collaborative is working to connect, strengthen, and leverage Dartmouth’s work on climate and long-term resilience, including amplifying opportunities for scholarship, encouraging students to become informed and engaged “climate citizens,” and using experiential learning and the campus as a living laboratory to foster more understanding of the environment.
Abigail Neely, an associate professor of geography and the School House professor, said she first encountered McKibben’s influential work when she was a sophomore at Princeton University, and again when she was pursuing graduate study at the University of Wisconsin. In her introduction to McKibben, she recalled a keynote address he gave in Madison many years ago.
“In the case of climate change, he told the crowd that the time for waiting is over. It is a time for action on all fronts, no more politics as usual. And it was electric, one of those nights that I think we all get about a dozen of in our lives,” Neely said. “His ability to work with broad coalitions, to build a robust climate movement, to not sit still or keep quiet, makes the world a better place.”
After the McKibben talk, William Kiker ’24, an intern with a New Hampshire state senator, said, “The biggest thing that inspired me from this talk is feeling like I was in a position to personally act, because he talked a lot about how state governments are able to make a difference in the United States through things like permitting reform for things like balcony solar panels.”
