Bill McKibben: How close to catastrophe?

Much more deeply researched, and much more hopeful, data come from the investment banker Travis Bradford. MIT Press has just issued his first book, Solar Revolution, which argues at great length and in great detail that we will soon be turning to solar panels for our power, in part for environmental reasons but more because they will soon be producing power that’s as cheap — and much easier to deploy — than any other source. This is a fairly astounding claim -– the conventional wisdom among environmentalists is that solar energy lags behind wind power by a decade or more as a cost-effective source of electricity — but he makes the case in convincing fashion.

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