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solar power
Climate Hope—and Wisdom—From Abroad
As Trump tacks tariffs onto films from “foreign lands,” we can still be inspired by other countries’ environmental visions, from China’s affordable electric vehicles to Germany’s balcony solar.
May 06, 2025
Every once in a while our mad king hits on an accidentally poetic turn of phrase in one of his strangely punctuated missives. In one of this week’s movie-based announcements (not the one about reopening San Francisco’s notorious island prison, which apparently followed a showing of Escape From Alcatraz on the Palm Beach PBS station) (not PBS’ fault, support them here), he declared that he was henceforth “instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
It was the last phrase—“foreign lands”—that attracted me; it conjures up European monarchs of earlier centuries dispatching sailors to see if fountains of youth or dragons or some such might be found off the edges of existing charts. (No, as it turned out, just Indigenous people who could be forced to part with their “foreign lands”). It’s a reminder that for Trump, and for many of us, a myopic focus on what’s happening here is a mistake, because we’ve long assumed that we’re at the head of the world. That unconscious supremacy—born in the actual enormous lead we had in living standards in the rubble of World War II—no longer makes much sense. So just a quick survey of what those funny people in other places are up to.
The rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
Take China, emerging as Earth’s first electro-state. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent account this week of just how far our economies are diverging. Autos are a key piece of technology, one that produces both a large supply and technology chain, and a clue to a country’s identity. In America, Peter Landers, pointed out, the “standard family choice” is a $50,000 gas-fired SUV; in China,
A majority of new vehicles sold in China are either fully electric or plug-in hybrids, and a look around the recent auto show in Shanghai showed that local makers have mostly stopped introducing new gasoline-powered models. In the U.S., by contrast, the traditional combustion engine still powers about 8 in 10 new vehicles.
The price difference is overwhelming. Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. Because of customer demand, even the low-end models come with advanced driver-assistance software.
Ten thousand dollars for a “decent starter model.” We’re not talking junk: “a new Toyota electric-powered sport-utility vehicle for about $15,000, complete with sunroof and cup holders.” Some of this comes because Chinese automakers are paid less (enough, however, to afford a new car); some of it comes from increasingly roboticized factories; and some of it comes from government subsidy. Because the government has decided it wants to own the future: Whose cars do you think are going to do better in, um, “foreign lands”? Bloomberg, in March, reported that Chinese automakers were “taking over roads from Brazil to South Africa”:
In South Africa, China-made vehicles account for nearly 10% of sales, or about five times the volume sold in 2019. In Turkey, Chinese brands claimed an 8% share in the first six months of 2024, up from almost none in 2022. In Chile, they have accounted for nearly a third of auto sales for several years running.
China sends more vehicles abroad than any other country, and its passenger car exports surged nearly 20% to 4.9 million in 2024 alone, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers—from less than 1 million in 2020.
In Brazil,
Luiz Palladino, 61, an engineer who has owned GM and Honda vehicles in the past and currently drives a Haval H6 EV, compared the car with much more expensive luxury cars.
“The moment I got into the car I thought: It’s in line with BMWs, Audis, with top-notch car finishing,” he said. “It has everything I want.”
Ok, that’s China (where thanks to huge solar buildout the use of coal for electricity dropped 5% in the first quarter, even as electricity demand surged). Now let’s look at Britain, where humans first learned to burn fossil fuels in quantity in the 18th century. There, the Labor government is apparently set to announce that all new homes will come with solar panels up top.
Housebuilders would be mandated by law to install solar roof panels on new properties by 2027 under new rules, seen by The Times, which ministers have claimed would slash energy bills and reduce emissions.
The change was estimated to add about £3,300 to the cost of building a semi-detached or terraced house and just under £4,000 for a detached property.
However, it was expected that new homeowners would recoup the extra costs within four years, with an average three-bedroom semi-detached saving more than £1,000 a year on energy bills.
This makes eminent sense because
Fitting solar power during construction is much cheaper than adding it to older buildings, which requires costly scaffolding and often new wiring. The payoff will be lower bills for consumers and lower emissions from buildings, which have become the second-biggest carbon polluter after transport.
And it comes despite the efforts of former British Prime Minister (and current Saudi lobbyist) Tony Blair to scupper such advances. Keir Starmer has four more years on his electoral mandate; Canada’s Mark Carney five, and after last week’s smashing election win Australia’s Anthony Albanese has three; the rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
In Germany, for instance, as many as 3 million apartments may now have “balcony solar” arrays, solar panels that can be bought for a few hundred euros at the equivalent of Home Depot, hung from the railing of your veranda, and plugged straight into the wall, where they provide a reasonable amount of power. As France 24 reported recently:
City authorities in Frankfurt gave Christoph Stadelmann, a 60-year-old teacher, half of the 650 euros ($676) he paid for his kit at the beginning of last year.
Stadelmann expects to make his money back within three years.
Mirjam Sax said she would recommend balcony solar panels in spite of Germany's sometimes grey weather.
"If you've got a balcony, if you've got a bit of sun, you can put up a panel or two to see if it's worth it," she said.
"It's easy, and there's a price for every budget."
You can’t do that in America, because our country has fallen behind these foreign lands. As Grist reported last week, Underwriters Laboratory, which certifies appliances, hasn’t bothered to do the work to approve the systems, which means they can’t legally be installed in most places.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems.
Happily, we have some “relentless individuals” here as well—Cora Stryker, for instance, who this year started Bright Saver—to bring the balcony technology to America. I talked with her at some length last week: I’ve stuck our exchange into question-and-answer format below
- Is America finally getting balcony solar!? Tell me about how you heard about this new development and got involved.
Yes! We’re already doing installations in the SF Bay Area and we are looking for early adopters to help us start a “balcony” plug-in solar movement in this country like the one we are seeing in Germany. As you know, plug-in solar isn’t just for balconies. It can go almost anywhere—in the backyard, the side of a house, in front of a garage, etc. My cofounders and I started Bright Saver because we believe that the benefits of producing clean energy at home should be available to everyone, not just homeowners with good roofs who can commit to spending $20-30k, although our system is also great for folks like me who have maxed out our rooftop solar capacity and want more power. Rooftop solar is all or nothing—what we are offering is a more modular, lower-commitment, more affordable, and versatile solar option as an alternative.
In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
I first heard about balcony solar when you started writing about it, actually! Then I met my cofounders Kevin Chou and Rupert Mayer—tech entrepreneurs who got the climate call—and I joined as the long-time climate advocate among us.
2) What's your hope for this project—how big can this get?
We can get big. Really big.
Seventy percent of Americans can’t get rooftop solar, but millions in that group want it. How can we produce more clean energy nationwide? We believe the solution is to address accessibility first, giving everyone an option to produce solar at home. This will give millions of Americans an option to become primary producers of their own energy, saving on electricity bills, and, we believe, bringing millions into the climate movement, giving us all hope that the power to address climate rests in our hands.
If we do this right, we follow in Germany’s footsteps, and produce several gigawatts of clean energy annually. However, unlike Germany, we can’t take the risk of letting it take 10 years to ramp up because we don’t have 10 years when it comes to climate. That’s why we started Bright Saver—to make this happen more quickly than it would on its own.
3) The U.S. has different wiring than Europe—explain if this is a problem and how it's overcome?
That’s been a structural—pun intended—concern for some time. In Europe, you can buy plug-in solar units at the grocery store for a few hundred Euros, plug them into the wall, and you’re done. Unfortunately, we can’t use those European systems because, as you point out, we have a 120-volt electrical system and most of Europe is on a 230-volt system.
Here, we are limited in the number of systems that are compatible with our electrical system and they are expensive and not easy to install. We exist to eliminate these barriers to adoption. For instance, as a nonprofit, we keep our prices low and we install the system, a complicated process that requires a licensed electrician.
My job is to put myself out of a job—if we jumpstart this movement now, we get more manufacturers into the game; competition drives down prices and increases ease of use, which stimulates more widespread adoption; and the virtuous cycle continues on market forces without us. In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
4) What do you need from local authorities to really make this happen?
We are primarily installing units in the backyard or front yard, where we believe permits are rarely a concern. I have young kids, and I can’t think of any parents who got a permit to put a trampoline or a slide in the backyard. Similarly, the 800 watt units we are installing are impermanent structures which you plug into an outdoor outlet like an appliance. They are half the electricity load of a hair dryer, and we include a smart power meter to make sure they never backfeed into the grid.
What we need is local and state legislation like what just passed unanimously in Utah. As you know, that legislation eliminates the ambiguity when it comes to mounted plug-in systems so folks can put them anywhere that is convenient for them. In fact, part of our nonprofit’s mission is to build a national coalition of advocacy groups to help pass such legislation in all 50 states—so please get in touch if you know groups that might want to join our coalition!
5) Why do you need donations to get this started?
Without donations, we stay small and grow slowly. I’ve been approached by several venture capitalists who say to me, you have huge market potential—let’s talk! But we want to keep lowering and lowering prices as we get bigger, not feeling the pressure of investors wanting us to raise prices and increase profits. We are a nonprofit because, well, w're not here to profit—we are here to bring solar to everyone who wants it.
We have a big vision to give all Americans the option to become energy independent. We plan to include home battery storage in the future, but we are only four months old, we have limited funding, and we need to start somewhere. Donating or becoming an early adopter will make it possible for us to stay true to our mission of serving everyone with solar energy and growing the climate movement so that every household of every means can start producing their own energy from the sun.
Many thanks to Stryker and her friends for getting this off the ground (and if you think it tickles me that she first read about the concept in this newsletter, then you’re right; that’s why I do this).
And here’s the thing. Though Americans aren’t used to it, there’s sometimes something useful in being behind all those other foreign lands. They’ve figured out what needs to happen, and all we have to do is copy. That’s what China did for decades—maybe it’s our turn. And now I’m going to go watch a bunch of foreign movies before the tariffs kick in.
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Honoring Pope Francis, Who Championed the Glorious World Around Us
Francis’s project for the Earth—a recovery of fellow feeling, with a special attention to the poor—is the only thing that can save us over time.
Apr 21, 2025
Just in case I thought one couldn’t feel more forlorn right now, the word came this morning of the death of Pope Francis. It hit me hard—not because I’m a Catholic (I’m a Methodist) but because I had always felt buoyed by his remarkable spirit. If he could bring new hope and energy to an institution as hidebound as the Vatican, there was reason for all of us to go on working on our own hidebound institutions—and if he could stand so completely in solidarity with the world’s poor and vulnerable, then it gave the rest of us something to aim for.
I thought this from the start, when he became the first pope to choose the name of Francis—that countercultural blaze of possibility in a dark time—and when he showed his mastery of the art of gesture, washing the feet of women, of prisoners, of Muslim refugees. (Only Greta Thunberg, with her school strike, has so mastered the power of gesture in modern politics).
But he brought that moral resolve to the question of climate change, making it the subject of his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” the most important document of his papacy and arguably the most important piece of writing so far this millennium. I spent several weeks living with that book-length epistle in order to write about it for The New York Review of Books, and though I briefly met the man himself in Rome, it is that encounter with his mind that really lives with me. “Laudato Si” is a truly remarkable document—yes, it exists as a response to the climate crisis (and it was absolutely crucial in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, consolidating elite opinion behind the idea that some kind of deal was required). But it uses the climate crisis to talk in broad and powerful terms about modernity.
The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’… as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” This paradigm “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” Men and women, he writes, have from the start
intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.
In our world, however, “human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.” With the great power that technology has afforded us, it’s become
easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers, and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the Earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.
The deterioration of the environment, he says, is just one sign of this “reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.”
I think Francis’s project for the Earth—a recovery of fellow feeling, with a special attention to the poor—is the only thing that can save us over time. But it will take time—obviously for the moment we’ve chosen the opposite path, as exemplified by the fact that JD Vance, scourge of the refugee, darkened his last day on Earth.
In the meantime, Francis was very much a pragmatist, and one advised by excellent scientists and engineers. As a result, he had a clear technological preference: the rapid spread of solar power everywhere. He favored it because it was clean, and because it was liberating—the best short-term hope of bringing power to those without it, and leaving that power in their hands, not the hands of some oligarch somewhere.
As a result, he followed up “Laudato Si” with a letter last summer, “Fratello Sole,” which reminds everyone that the climate crisis is powered by fossil fuel, and which goes on to say
There is a need to make a transition to a sustainable development model that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, setting the goal of climate neutrality. Mankind has the technological means to deal with this environmental transformation and its pernicious ethical, social, economic, and political consequences, and, among these, solar energy plays a key role.
As a result, he ordered the Vatican to begin construction of a field of solar panels on land it owned near Rome—an agrivoltaic project that would produce not just food but enough solar power to entirely power the city-state that is the Vatican. It is designed, in his words, to provide “the complete energy sustenance of Vatican City State.” That is to say, this will soon be the first nation powered entirely by the sun.
The level of emotion—of love—in this decision is notable. The pope named “Laudato Si” (“Praised be”) after the first two words of his namesake’s “Canticle to the Sun,” and “Fratello Sole” was even more closely tied—those are the words that the first Francis used to address Brother Sun. I reprint the opening of the Canticle here, in homage to both men, and to their sense of humble communion with the glorious world around us.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
The world is a poorer place this morning. But far richer for his having lived.
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We Can Accelerate the Clean Energy Transition, Even Under Trump
The momentum toward a sustainable future will be unstoppable if clean energy supporters speak up in their own communities.
Feb 23, 2025
Here's a bold prediction for the start of the second Trump administration: The next four years will be the best yet for America's clean energy transition.
That may sound surprising, given the significant steps President Donald Trump has already taken to try to reverse American leadership on climate and clean energy. There's much still unknown about the potential impact of Trump's early executive orders, but one truth remains clear: Far from slowing down, we could be entering a period of unprecedented renewable energy progress.
There's already strong momentum behind the clean energy shift, and whether that momentum continues is less dependent on the federal government than you might think. Trump can't change the reality that, for a huge number of clean energy projects, the permitting authority rests not with federal agencies, but with state and local decision-makers.
Now more than ever, speaking up for clean energy in your community is one of the most impactful steps you can take for the planet, your local economy, and the health and safety of future generations.
This means that the main determinant of how much progress clean energy makes over the next four years isn't the Trump administration. It's your neighbors—and you.
Don't be distracted by all the ink that will be spilled in the coming months about Trump's efforts to slow progress on offshore wind and electric vehicles, or to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). For starters, experts agree that a full repeal of the IRA—which made the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history—is unlikely. This landmark law has been an economic boon to red and blue states alike, earning bipartisan support.
The way forward remains open for the vast majority of clean energy projects permitted mostly or entirely at the state and local level. There, local governments, influenced by support across the political spectrum, have become powerful engines of clean energy progress.
Solar and wind are now the cheapest energy options available, even without subsidies. Across the country, these technologies are increasingly boosting local economies, generating revenue for public services, creating well-paying jobs, and delivering health and climate benefits for millions.
Now, our often-overlooked town planning and zoning commissions or county councils hold the key to driving clean energy forward in the coming years. Right now, these spaces are often dominated by small numbers of highly organized opponents—many backed by the same fossil fuel-linked interests that are now shaping Trump's energy policy. Left unchecked, these opponents have become adept at stalling or derailing clean energy progress. As of early 2024, at least 15% of U.S. counties had effectively banned utility-scale wind or solar projects, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans support these technologies.
Here's the opportunity. With so few people in attendance at local hearings, noisy opponents can significantly influence local decision-makers. That also means every person who makes the choice to speak out in favor of clean energy projects can make a big difference.
Take Mesa County, Colorado, where volunteers with the Western Colorado Alliance came together to overturn a moratorium on solar development in spring 2024. The handful of volunteers who took the time to show up to the pivotal public hearing helped ensure that community support for solar growth was on clear display, outweighing the opposition and convincing local officials to lift the county's ban.
This small group of volunteers helped create jobs, improved health, made their grid more reliable, and had a bigger impact for the climate in one step, together, than through years of individual actions. Even one 500-megawatt solar array that gets built as a result will help avoid the carbon emissions of more than 80,000 people switching to electric vehicles.
With a focus on supporting more of these projects in communities nationwide, clean energy will continue to boom in Trump's second term and beyond, creating a more livable climate and stronger economy for all.
So how do you take action where you live? It's easier than you think—here's a guide to getting started. Visit your city, county, or town's website and see what's on the planning docket. Check your local media for news about clean energy. And when you hear about a proposed project, don't just assume it will happen—or that it will fail. Do your research, share what you learn with neighbors, and reach out to organizations like the one I founded, Greenlight America, for help.
Most importantly, follow the project's approval process and, when it's up for a vote, be there or write in to voice your support to local leaders. They say 90% of success in life is showing up. For clean energy permitting, it's more like 100%.
Now more than ever, speaking up for clean energy in your community is one of the most impactful steps you can take for the planet, your local economy, and the health and safety of future generations.
There will be hundreds of opportunities to make this impact across the country in the next four years. Together, project by project and community by community, we can all fight climate change and pollution and bring clean energy and its economic benefits to all of our communities. The power is in our hands.
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