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'Celebratory and Uplifting': Sun Day Events Champion Promise of Wind and Solar
A list of events, including the ones nearest you, can be found on the events page of the Sun Day website.
Sun Day aims to be a beam of optimism amid a relentless attack on greener energy by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress, who have been in lock step with the coal, oil, and gas companies that fund their political campaigns and lobby without mercy on Capitol Hill.
"We need Sun Day to show decision makers and thought leaders of all kinds—local, state, and federal elected officials, business leaders, civic leaders, labor unions—that Americans of all walks of life, and all incomes want affordable, reliable clean energy for all," say the organizers. "We want the policy reforms and investments to accelerate and scale up the clean energy transition. We are the majority and we want a clean and healthy future for ourselves and the coming generations."
As the New York Times noted on Saturday:
Sun Day comes as the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have moved to eliminate tax credits for electric vehicles, heat pumps and solar power. The administration has also repealed funding for Biden-era programs like Solar for All, which aimed to make solar energy available to low income households. In recent weeks, it has worked to throttle the offshore wind industry, canceling wind farms midconstruction.
At the same time, the Trump administration is promoting the expanded development and use of oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is heating the planet.
As part of its organizing efforts, the Sun Day group created an online tool for people to draw their own distinct sun, using half the group's logo on one side. That led to an outpouring of participation leading up to the actual day of action, as this sampling shows:
Self-produced sun drawings for Sun Day using the online tool.
As McKibben explained in an interview with Fast Company, the logo is interactive by design and speaks to the ethos of the Sun Day project and the message it's trying to send.
“The basic message becomes we have half of what we need, we now have the technology. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun,” McKibben explains. But what's missing and most urgent, he added, was the political will—and that's where the people, the other half as we are, come in.
And there's no time to waste. Despite Trump's destructive policies, scientists have long noted that the physics of global warming and the impacts of the climate crisis have this in common: they don't care about politics.
Even as renewable energy production has continued to surge in the US—thanks to technological innovations, market forces, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) by the Democrats under President Joe Biden, which included sweeping investments in renewables—emissions continue to rise due to the stranglehold of the fossil fuel giants.
In addition to dismantling the IRA bit by bit and as much as possible, Trump has targeted individual renewable energy projects, including the SouthCoast offshore wind project in Massachusetts, which he targeted this week by rescinding its federal construction permit.
“Donald Trump and his administration are taking a sledgehammer to clean energy in order to boost profits for dirty fossil fuels—and everyday Americans are the collateral damage," said Nancy Pyne, a senior advisor at the Sierra Club, in response to the attack on the Southcoast project.
The Sun Day effort was given a boost by McKibben's Vermont neighbor and longtime friend, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said he will never fully understand the greed that drives the world's fossil fuel executives, as their business model does so much damage to people and the planet.
Despite the familiar anger and frustration with the fossil fuel industry and those lawmakers who operate on their behalf, organizers for the Sun Day events say they aim to be optimistic and joyful as they come together.
"I really wanted it to be celebratory and uplifting,” said Laura Iwanaga, who led organizing efforts for the local chapter of Third Act for the day's events in Portland, Oregon, set to be perhaps the largest anywhere in the country, according to the Times. “We all know what we’re fighting against but we don’t always think about what we’re fighting for.”
In an interview with investor and activist Tom Steyer published over the weekend, McKibben explains that while the solar and wind revolution is inevitable, humanity doesn't have time to delay the transition any more than it already has.
"If it were not for the press of climate change, then we could just sit back and happily watch this thing play out," said McKibben. "The problem is that we have to move fast because we're going to run the world on sun and wind in 30 years. It's that cheap. But if it takes us anything like 30 years to get there, then the world we run on sun and wind is a broken world. So that's what we have to avoid."
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