Book Review: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (2025). Bill McKibben

For those who don’t know, Bill McKibben is a lifelong environmental activist, journalist and author of more than twenty books. His first book, The End of Nature (1989), was one of the first books about climate change written for general audiences, and he has written many other books about the environment and humans ever since. He is also one of the founders of the climate change activist group 350.org, as well as Third Act, an environmental activist group for seniors.

So presumably we can expect dire warnings of impending environmental disaster from any new McKibben book, right? But with his new book, Here Comes the Sun, we get something unexpected – a very hopeful book in this time of environmental and political peril.

I was fortunate to be able to hear the author speak a few weeks ago, when he was in town for Seattle Arts and Lectures, and his talk in person reinforced the message of this new book. The message is this: even though our political situation may be dire, the worldwide prospects for replacing the fossil fuel industry with renewable energy sources have never been greater.

McKibben tells the story of how solar and wind power technology is being adopted around the world at rates never seen before. He contrasts our current situation during the second Trump administration in the United States, where the U.S. government is doing everything it can to preserve fossil fuel industries and undermine or block renewables, with both the ongoing rapid growth in renewable energy and storage capacity here in our own country (including in very red states), and astounding increases in renewable energy generation in many other parts of the world.

He particularly contrasts the obstructionist energy policies of the U.S. administration with China’s decision to become the manufacturing center for renewable energy generation technology, and other hardware and software needed for electric-based economies around the world. The result has been that the cost of solar panels is continuing to drop rapidly, as supplies of Chinese solar panels increase and economies of scale kick in.

Countries around the world are taking rapid advantage of Chinese solar equipment, and McKibben points out that China is now rapidly becoming the top manufacturer of affordable, high-quality electric vehicles and appliances in the world too.

Not content to just make these general assertions, he provides charts and graphs to demonstrate how much of the power needs here and abroad are now coming from renewable energy sources, and to show that a transition to a new electric age appears to be happening much faster than we thought. He also has some remarkable recent anecdotes to share to support this claim.

For example, in one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, local power companies began to notice the strange phenomenon of falling demand for power from consumers during the past year. It turned out that poor Pakistani people and communities were importing cheap solar panels from China, and hooking them up locally, thus creating decentralized electric power sources that cost little, and freed them from needing their power utility’s fossil fuel-generated power.

Similar stories are emerging from around the world, as other countries and their peoples discover that setting up solar and wind power is a far cheaper and easier solution to their power needs than importing fossil fuels. He mentions the fact that solar power units are now being sold in many countries as “balcony” units than can be purchased from big box stores, hung outside of apartments, and plugged right into a wall socket to feed energy into the grid. 

He also discusses the importance of improvements in battery technology, production and deployments, and how that is helping to address the problem of how to guarantee electricity supplies remain available during the times when the sun isn't out or the wind isn't blowing.

McKibben is not underestimating the political obstacles to replacing fossil fuels, particularly here in the U.S., but he is trying to make the case for why renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious and most practical solution to the world’s power needs. One of his main talking points is that renewables are no longer the “alternatives” to fossil fuels, and we should stop thinking of them as just backups or "next best" solutions to fossil fuels. 

In fact, he claims, they are now the obvious go-to solution, because they are less expensive, cleaner, more cost-effective over time, and now abundantly available due especially to Chinese manufacturing and sales. All we need to do is keep deploying them, and prevent the fossil fuel companies and their supporters in politics and power utilities from obstructing progress in the necessary transition away from fossil fuels.

This is an up-to-the-minute primer on renewable energy, and why and how solar and wind power, along with fast-increasing energy storage technologies, are now poised to take us into a new electric age, even in a time of political adversity. If some of his predictions seem a little overly rosy, it is still an uplifting and encouraging story in an often dark and demoralizing time.

Here Comes the Sun is a quick read and an optimistic tale, just what we need to hear at this moment, as the current U.S. administration tries to dismantle environmental protections, and drag our energy systems back to the mid-twentieth century. Recommended.

Book Review: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (2025). Adam Becker.

I’ve been very interested lately in artificial intelligence (AI) and our current fears and hopes about it, and have done a lot of reading on the topic. From the title, this book looked like it might be more of the same. But actually this is the one book I’ve read that goes deeper into the underlying problem behind not only AI, but also many of the other themes and obsessions occupying the attention of our high-tech oligarchs.

The basic story here is surprisingly easy to grasp. A small circle of grown-up boys, fascinated by the science fiction stories of the mid-twentieth century they read as children, have become the leaders of new technology empires, often based on devices and applications they invented. In the process, they became so fabulously wealthy that they can now exert disproportionate influence on policy and funding for research and development of new technologies that echo the science fiction stories they loved in their youth.

An unfortunately common collateral development was that as they became richer and more powerful, these men increasingly began to fall victim to “the engineer’s fallacy” – the idea that because they had invented or designed something remarkable, and had become vastly wealthy using their bright intellects, engineering skills, social connections and astonishingly good luck, that they were also the smartest people in every domain of knowledge and policy, even ones in which they had no training or relevant experience.

It is true that these "bright boys" have brought much of mid-twentieth century science fiction into being. Our computers, our global electronic networks, our smartphones, our software, our healthcare, our transportation systems – all these science and technology miracles, and many more, have been brought into being in our lifetimes by some of these men, in ways that do resemble science fiction stories of the past century. 

And certainly there will be more amazing technology developments and scientific leaps ahead for humanity, presuming that the second Trump administration doesn’t destroy our ability to do science and educate our young to prepare them for the future. The problem is that although many astonishing breakthroughs have occurred, that doesn’t mean that every 20th century science fiction plot can come true, or will. Some of them are just fantasies, and will remain so.

Becker does a wonderful job inventorying the wrong turns and bad ideas now being promoted by a familiar cast of characters: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Marc Andressen, and others in their Silicon Valley circles who are less well known to us. In this absorbing walk through the tech bros’ grandest dreams, the author lays bare the shaky scientific foundations on which their hyped-up plans rest, their problematic ethical and philosophical roots, and the personal quirks of the leaders who have been involved in promoting them.

Early on, there is an excellent discussion of the rise of “effective altruism” (EA). This was originally conceived of as an approach to life and charity that suggested that giving should be based on a moral imperative to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people per dollar. Many of the current generation of wealthy tech leaders were enthusiasts. It sounded morally very defensible in theory.

But then the tech and finance types who found it so appealing for its rational-sounding ethics began to come up with other complementary ideas, like “long termism” – the notion that effective giving should be based on the number of lives saved across all future time.

When combined with outlandish beliefs about space colonization, life extension, eugenics and other unproven technologies and science, this quickly led EA enthusiasts in high tech to rationalize focusing their investments on those areas where there was a great deal of money to be made, while feeling ethically excused from dealing with any contemporary problem areas or suffering. From there, the author traces how EA and its offspring tendencies have devolved into various factions and cults.

Becker particularly caught my attention with his history of K. Eric Drexler, the MIT-trained cross-disciplinary engineer and scientist who wrote Engines of Creation in 1986, the book which launched the nanotechnology revolution. (I met Drexler while he was promoting his book and ideas back then, and even became enthusiastic about his theories for a time, after hearing him speak at a conference of space colonization enthusiasts).

Drexler’s thrilling idea was that we would soon be able to utterly transform the world, create inexhaustible wealth, fix all diseases, cure aging, and create colonies in space, using tiny robot engines to build and transform materials at the molecular level. This was nanotechnology as he defined and explained it, and it sounded like magic come true.

Drexler had some brilliant insights, based on an idea originally voiced by the famous physicist Richard Feynmann. As the first and greatest promoter of this new field he conceptualized – “nanotechnology” – Drexler really did set off a “race to the bottom” in the late 1980s and 1990s for research and development in many different disciplines, most notably in medicine, genetics and materials sciences. Large amounts of money would be allocated for nanotechnology R&D based on his ideas and his persuasive promotion of them, and many important scientific advances did happen as a result.

The problem was, as Becker explains, that Drexler’s actual plan – building invisibly small smart robots that could manufacture substances and products molecule by molecule – has still never happened. It doesn’t appear to be practical for a variety of physical and financial reasons. After a while, despite the lack of progress in achieving the specific nanotech engineering vision he promoted, Drexler’s dreams for the nanotechnology golden age, and his group of followers, increasingly took on the appearance of other tech cults or religions. As with EA and AI, this led inevitably to schism and apostasy among his true believers.

Becker goes on to dismantle other fantasies and wishful thinking of his wealthy tech subjects. He shows why the belief in artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the very near future appears to be an article of faith in AI business circles, but not one that can be supported by either the current large language models (LLM) used to train AI, or Moore’s Law (which appears to be reaching its end).

As he explains in detail, the belief in infinite technical acceleration in AI R&D breakthroughs, and in fast-doubling computing power, is already beginning to crash against physical, technical and financial limitations imposed by  the real world, and must inevitably do so.

The author points out that exponential growth cannot continue forever in any system, and it won’t. But without that kind of rapid growth in computing power, the common theory in the AI industry that scaling up existing AI models will inevitably lead to AGI simply collapses. It is a wan hope and a marketing ploy, not a realistic prediction.

Becker does a similarly effective job demolishing the idea of space colonization, which billionaires  like Musk and Bezos believe is inevitable, essential to humanity’s survival, and likely to occur very soon. Becker claims (and I agree) that space colonization could happen only over a very long time, likely centuries or millenia, or more likely never, and for very good and obvious reasons.

(For an amusing and more extensive book-length analysis of the many barriers to space colonization, read A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023), by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, which I also enjoyed reading recently).

Becker notes that the surface of Mars contains an abundant substance, perchlorate, that is poisonous to humans, a fact discovered by the robotic Mars landers. Cosmic radiation and lack of earth-equivalent gravity are also already known to degrade the human body in space. All known planetary bodies in the solar system except Earth cannot sustain human life for many reasons – no air, wrong temperatures, too much radiation, too much or too little gravity, poisonous environments and so on. There are simply limits to what even clever engineering can overcome.

Space colonization would also require safely transporting a huge number of people, probably hundreds of thousands or millions (needed to sustain a healthy population with sufficient genetic diversity) across vast distances and time periods, by some means of mass space travel not yet invented, and where necessities of colonization such as human reproduction are unproven, unlikely or impossible. Even attempting reproduction in space would involve ethically indefensible experimentation on any future human children who might be created.

And then there is the most obvious other question. How many actual humans on Earth would risk their life and future to attempt to live on a deadly planet Mars, or in a manufactured deep space colony? The obvious answer is “not very many”.

In short, space colonization won’t happen in any near-term foreseeable future, but spending billions on it can be much more fun, exciting and profitable than admitting to or worrying about solving the very real and immediate problems humanity faces here on its home planet.

Becker goes on to describe and then puncture more sacred fantasies of the ultra-rich tech oligarchs. Infinite life extension. Elaborate bunkers and preparations for surviving social collapse. Uploading human consciousness to the cloud, and the predicted impending Singularity to be caused by AI.

Becker notes (as others have also observed) that the idea of the Singularity, so popular in AI circles, bears more resemblance to ancient religious ideas like the Rapture or Armageddon, in its vision of a mysterious godlike power taking control of humanity’s fate and giving everyone eternal life in “heaven”, than it does to any scientifically-based projection of our likely futures.

Becker ties many of these tech bro aspirations back to the universal desire to escape death. It must be demoralizing for many of these powerful men to have so conquered this material world, yet to face the same aging process and ultimate demise as the rest of us. And they’re not going quietly into that night. They have their sci-fi visions of how to escape it, and the money to pursue those visions, no matter how outlandish and hopeless their plans may be.

And that, as Becker finally concludes in the last two pages of this essential book, is the root of the problem these few mega-rich, mostly white male tech leaders now pose for humanity.

Like the rest of us, they are free to pursue their dreams, make mistakes, have foolish ideas and hopes, and try to bring to life the fantastic stories they loved in their childhoods, regardless of how impossible or meaningless their goals might seem to others. But unlike the rest of us, they have the money and power to make their vain pursuits everyone else’s problem, and to waste huge financial and social resources that might be far better applied to fixing humanity’s real and immediate challenges.

The underlying problem here, Becker concludes, is billionaires, especially tech billionaires with childish beliefs based on sci-fi fantasies. If it weren’t for their power and wealth, he suggests, modern society wouldn’t be taking most of their grandiose but absurd ideas as seriously as we do.

After reading this very entertaining and well-researched book, and its thorough debunking of the science and logic behind these high tech moguls’ expensive hobbies, fetishes and plans, I would hope most readers would agree with his conclusions. That’s an important recognition for all of us as we consider any future hype, business decisions and political machinations of this small but massively influential power elite.

They may have won life’s financial lottery, but they aren’t necessarily wiser or more well-meaning than the rest of us. We shouldn’t believe they are, just because they’re fabulously rich, and can harness a massive hype machine and political influence to promote their ideas. 

Adam Becker has written the definitive expose’ on the Silicon Valley tech elite, and their flawed visions of the future. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sociopath: A Memoir (2024). Patric Gagne, PhD.

Years ago, I read and reviewed The Sociopath Next Door (2005) by Martha Stout, an eye-opening survey of sociopathy by a clinical psychologist with a career specialty in treating subjects with this condition. From that book, I learned that sociopathy is generally characterized by the lack of normal human empathy towards others, along with a lack of moral inhibitions and remorse. It is usually accompanied by a range of anti-social behaviors, and is believed to exist in about 4% of the human population, a figure which appears to be relatively consistent across different ethnic groups.

I have remained interested in the topic ever since, the more so throughout the first and now second Trump administrations, during which sociopathic behavior and its extreme adverse effects on other people have been on daily public display in the Oval Office, and from other major figures within the administration and the MAGA Republican Party. 

For that reason, when I saw reviews of Dr. Patric Gagne’s book Sociopath: A Memoir last year, I knew I would have to read it. It seemed almost unbelievable that an actual sociopath would not only publicly confess to having this condition, but would be willing to write a book-length autobiography about herself, describing what all she had done, and what she had felt or not felt about it.

Dr. Gagne tells a remarkable and even sympathetic story about her life and condition. She doesn’t hide who she is, and many of the shocking things she’s done in the course of growing up and slowly gaining insight into herself. She describes stabbing a classmate as a second grader with a pencil (one of the few transgressions for which she got in trouble), and a habit she developed early on of breaking into neighbors’ houses, scouting them and hanging out in them while the owners were away. She admits to stealing, lying and enjoying getting away with things she knew were not socially or legally acceptable. And she does confess to a lack of remorse or empathy for others.

She was also very smart. Her intelligence helped her do well in school, as well as helping her learn to conceal her lack of empathy and her deceitful behaviors from most other people. Of course, her parents and family eventually figured out that something wasn’t right with her, but she was bright and high-functioning, as many sociopaths are.

At the time she was growing up, there wasn’t yet a huge awareness or large body of psychological research on sociopathy. What little information there was tended to be focused on criminal psychopaths and older people who were institutionalized, which didn’t help her understand why and how she was different from her family members, and others she encountered at school and in the neighborhood.

This is an important and fascinating story of how a gifted sociopathic woman tried to cope with her lack of empathy and inability to connect with people around her emotionally, and to understand the traits that are hallmarks of her condition. She takes us through her childhood of maladaptive behaviors, her encounters with therapists as an adolescent, and ultimately the fortuitous connections she made at university that allowed her to begin to study and research sociopathy as a  college student and then an academic.

One particularly interesting part of her story was her description of a sort of “pressure” in her head that from an early age drove her to commit anti-social and forbidden acts, which were the only way she knew as a child to relieve this pressure that would build up inside her head. As she grew older, she slowly began to find alternative techniques she could use to relieve this pressure, and teach herself not to act out as a remedy to her inner drive to misbehave.

Eventually, in her own determination to figure out how to fit into normal society, and how to avoid doing “wrong” even though she didn’t feel any empathy or remorse herself, she gained the credentials as a psychologist (including her PhD) that allowed her to counsel and treat other sociopaths, and do social and psychological research on the condition.

Amazingly, Dr. Gagne also found love with a partner, built a community of friends, and had children she cares for and loves. She tells the story of those relationships, how they began, the troubles she encountered in maintaining them, and lessons she learned along the way that helped her fit in and be successful, despite the void in her where caring and empathy should have been.

She also has found meaning in a professional life devoted to helping other people like herself adapt to what she believes is another form of neurodiversity, and find ways to fit into the larger human community that fears and despises them.

I was truly impressed by her account, her intellect and her insights. And I believe she is sincere, honest and well-meaning, although none of those attributes are ordinarily characteristics of sociopathic personalities.

On the other hand, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that she and her story are a sort of black swan event. I hope she is successful in treating others with this same condition, and admire all she has done and accomplished, while also maintaining deep reservations that the vast majority of sociopaths among us will ever travel the relatively hopeful and constructive path she found for herself.

It would take many more success stories like hers to convince me that we would ever be wise to let down our individual and collective defenses against these wolves among us. And now watching the rise of a whole political party and movement in America, led by obvious sociopaths who obey no rules or laws, clearly enjoy inflicting fear and violence on others, and show absolutely no remorse for their crimes is not helping to assuage my fears about the threats that sociopaths continue to pose to the rest of us.

Nevertheless, this well-written and highly readable memoir is an important contribution to our understanding of the sociopathic condition and the people who have it. It is a useful counterpoint and alternative perspective to books like The Sociopath Next Door, one informed by living with the condition and describing it from the inside. Highly recommended.