By Bill McKibben | December 10, 2025
By Bill McKibben | December 10, 2025
We sometimes think of the great discovery of the 20th century as the splitting of the atom—and of course this month the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is marking 80 years of dealing with the implications of that remarkable development. But if we survive the century more or less intact, I think it may be because of another invention, this one about seven decades in the rear-view mirror.
It was an early spring day in 1954 when a trio of researchers, who had been working on power sources for remote telephones, announced the first practical photovoltaic cell, a silicon-based device that managed to convert about six percent of the sunlight that fell on it into usable energy. That was enough for the “Bell Solar Battery” to power a tiny toy Ferris wheel and a small radio transmitter—and in the process to shift the world.
The New York Times that day featured stories about a new US effort to “end the war in Indo-China,” and 28 places to eat along the brand-new New York Thruway, ranging from “snack bars to swanky cafes.” The United States announced that the Iraqi government would receive “military help,” bringing to “29 the number of countries receiving aid under the United States mutual defense assistance program,” and a minister gave a farewell sermon to his downtown congregation, warning that too many Americans felt as if they were “live pawns in a chess game over which they have no control.” Philco advertised its 1954 line of air-conditioners, available at Wanamakers (“mount flush with window sill!”); and the newly crowned Mrs. America, a “tall St. Louis blonde” named Mrs. Madison Jennings who possessed “a 35-inch bust, a 25-inch waist, and 36-inch hips,” insisted in her victory statement that “I’m still a housewife,” and “to prove it headed for the kitchen of the Mrs. America cottage in Daytona Beach to prepare lunch for her husband and son.”
And there, on the bottom of page one (right next to a story about the expansion of the polio vaccination campaign beginning the next day), there was an account of the Bell Labs press conference, under the headline “Vast Power of the Sun is Tapped by Battery Using Sand Ingredient” (New York Times 1954). The new device, the Times reported, was a “simple-looking apparatus made of strips of silicon, a principal ingredient of common sand. It may mark the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harvesting of the almost limitless power of the sun for the uses of civilization.” The sun, the article noted, “pours out daily more than a quadrillion kilowatt hours of energy, greater than the energy contained in all the reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium in the earth’s crust.”
Although the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is, for many, practically synonymous with nuclear risks, the magazine has always been preoccupied by the biggest challenges and opportunities facing humankind—including rapidly expanding energy demands and the search for novel energy solutions. In 1951, the magazine published an impassioned article on the “Future Uses of Solar Energy” by Maria Telkes, a Hungarian-American physicist who worked on the Solar Energy Conversion Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was “an enthusiast of solar energy possibilities,” as her short Bulletin biography described her (Telkes 1951).
In her article, Telkes addressed solar naysayers and skeptics: “Conservative engineers treat this subject with near derision, pointing to the fuel reserves in oil, natural gas, and coal. On the basis of use at the present rate and of use at a progressively greater rate, the estimated fuel reserves of the United States should last for 100 to 1,000 years. A goal definitely more remote than a life-span is of secondary interest to most people, in particular to many engineers, who prefer to engage in the pursuit of tangible results, achievable within a short time. However, technological changes that may occur during a century may be vividly imagined by comparing the technology of 1851 with that of today.”
Anticipating its revolutionary potential, Telkes compared the nascent sector of solar energy to the automobile and airplane—both one-time impossibilities that became transformative technologies. She urged more investment in research and technology development, concluding, “Sunlight will be used as a source of energy sooner or later anyway. Why wait?”
At first, of course, the solar cell was mostly a novelty—nowhere near as important as the nuclear power which was starting to spread across the world on the promise that it would soon be too cheap to meter. It was used for satellites, and eventually for trinkets like calculators and wristwatches—but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the first house with solar panels was built in the United States, an experimental dwelling on the campus of the University of Delaware. The oil embargoes of that decade caused some to think that solar’s day had come: Jimmy Carter, in his final proposed budget, put aside money for research to ensure that solar would provide 20 percent of America’s energy by the year 2000. But Ronald Reagan was having none of it—he even pulled down the panels Carter had put on top of the White House.
All the while, though, the engineers kept slowly improving the technology. A key moment came late in the century, when the German Green party used its leverage in the country’s parliament to introduce a “feed-in tariff” to pay Germans a generous price for solar power they produced on their rooftops. That (expensive) mandate provided the demand that eventually led to the Chinese learning to mass-produce panels, and from that point on the fall in the cost of power from the sun has been fairly steady. Earlier this decade we passed one of those truly important milestones, as the cost of power from the sun slipped below the cost of burning coal and gas and oil. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And that is truly epochal: It allows us to imagine that humans might, after about a million years, give up the habit of setting things on fire.
Combustion made us who we are, but it also of course is now endangering our hold on civilization. The byproducts of fire—especially carbon dioxide—have kicked off the single biggest change in our planet in the history of our species. So far, at least, it hasn’t been the dramatic mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions that changed our world; it’s been the explosions of billions of pistons in billions of cylinders, the firing of furnaces in homes and factories, the carbon pouring from the smokestacks of power plants in volumes that dwarf the volcanoes that were, for countless eons, the source of most carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We know now the danger of that combustion: the jet stream, the Gulf Stream, and the other large systems of our planet are now in violent flux. By every measure (temperature, humidity, insurance premiums) we are changing the planet even faster than during the five great perturbations of the geological past.
But this broken relationship with the Earth can—irony of ironies—be healed at least in part by a new relationship with our local star. Because, thanks to the solar cell, it is now prepared to offer us (alongside warmth, light, and photosynthesis) all the power we could ever use. The explosive growth of solar power (and wind power, which after all is just another face of the sun’s energy) in the last three years is the first chance to actually scale something that might slow down the rise of the planet’s temperature. It took us from 1954 to 2022 to get the first terawatt of solar power installed on our planet; the second terawatt took us two years; the third is coming online just about now. In May alone, China was installing a gigawatt—the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant—every eight hours. And its carbon emissions were finally starting to plateau and even fall. In California, where we’ve clearly reached a tipping point of some kind over the last two years, the state is able to supply more electricity than it uses from renewable sources most days: the world’s fourth-largest economy is using 40 percent less natural gas to generate electricity this year than it did two years ago, which is the kind of number that could actually knock something substantial off the eventual temperature of the planet.
What was once a battle over technological feasibility and cost is now almost entirely one of ideological politics. The Trump administration, guided by its fossil fuel donors, has realized the threat that solar power poses to the profits of the hydrocarbon cartel, and is doing everything within its power to shut it down. That will cause tragic delay, but it will also mean that America is no longer the decisive player in this story: We’re absenting ourselves from global leadership on climate and energy, and ceding that position to China. This may have the paradoxical effect of speeding clean energy adoption in the rest of the world, which after all accounts for more than 85 percent of carbon emissions. China’s trading networks may turn out to be the path on which clean energy spreads: Already, in Asia and Africa, we’re seeing extremely rapid adoption not just of solar panels but of technologies like electric vehicles that make full use of that new flood of power.
Though markets will do much to spread this inexpensive power, there’s no guarantee that this will happen in time—the speed of solar deployment is matched only by the speed of spreading climate damage. But it is definitely the first scalable answer to global warming, the first thing that’s given us a chance of limiting the damage. And so we must push for it with all our might.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has long championed solar power and other renewable energy sources for the sake of humanity and the planet (the Telkes article is just one example of many). In the face of political resistance and potent disinformation, it must continue to match its dire warnings with optimism grounded in facts.
The sweetest irony, of course, is that ultimately this is the twentieth-century’s nuclear revolution made real. Because the biggest reactor in our neck of the woods is the sun, firing prodigious amounts of energy our direction as it endlessly converts hydrogen to helium. The middle of the twentieth century still turns out to be the crucial moment—just not quite in the way we once imagined.
New York Times. 1954. “Vast Power of the Sun Is Tapped By Battery Using Sand Ingredient.” April 26. The New York Times. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1954/04/26/83752409.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
Telkes, M. 1951. “Future Uses of Solar Energy.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (7–8). July 31. p 217–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.1951.11457193
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Keywords: climate change, climate crisis, climate solutions, global warming, photovoltaics, renewable energy, renewables, solar power
Topics: Climate Change, Magazine, Personal Essay, Special Topics
Bill McKibben is an author, educator, and environmentalist, who helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and who has … Read More
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