
Climate Connections: The sun can shine in 2025
Amy Cilimburg
I’ve attempted to write our first Climate Connections column of 2025 a ridiculous number of times. This month has been increasingly disorienting, and as I try to find the right path, I keep getting blown off course.
The frightening and heartbreaking L.A. fires consumed much of my attention – scientists already understand the indelible role that climate heating played in these urban firestorms – and then there’s the constant dread for what the new federal administration will do and is already doing to reverse course on climate, energy, justice, and so much more.
Through all the turbulence, what has been consistent this week is the sunshine! The forecast kept calling for inversions and stinky air but not everything forecasted actually comes to pass! The solar on our office and at my house has been cranking, powering heat pumps, computers, lights, and the grid itself. This helps power our resolve to keep going.
Clean electricity powered by the sun is the future. It really is time to turn off fossil fuels and turn to the sun as author and climate advocate Bill McKibben, who visited Missoula last fall, encourages at every chance. Inspiring facts:
- 2024 was the first year ever that wind and solar combined generated more electricity than coal in the U.S., and these made up over 90 percent of new capacity.
- The U.S. installed 30 GW of new solar capacity last year, expanding from 0.1% of U.S. electricity generation in 2010 to over 6% today according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
- The EIA expects solar to be the leading contributor of new generation on the grid over the next two years, and U.S. solar generation is forecasted to increase by 34% in 2025!
- It’s not just the U.S. China’s solar and wind power installations soared in 2024, and solar energy overtook coal in the EU’s energy mix for the first time in its entire history.
Around the world, solar and wind are healthier, cheaper, and more popular than hydrocarbons, and they will increasingly power our lives, for the rest of our lives. To paraphrase climate scientist Leah Stokes: All of us were born into a fossil fuel-based energy system. Nobody chose that, and the work of our life is to change that, to make it so future generations are born into a just system of abundant clean energy.
Here in Montana, it is still a great time for residents and businesses to go solar. Federal tax credits (30% of system costs) are still available, at least for 2025. We have great local solar companies ready to assess your roof and get you started, and helpful financing is also available. Check out Solar-Ease!
And there are opportunities to lend our voices at the 69th Montana legislative session to support solar (check out Montana Community Solar and sign on). We’re tracking bills that threaten clean energy and climate, and there are so many opportunities to advocate for a better future at the legislature – we show you how here.
What about Washington DC? The federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allocated $7 billion for a nationwide program called “Solar For All”, designed to encourage solar on low-income multifamily homes and residences, though as of this writing, this funding is “paused” and inaccessible. But IRA remains the law of this land. Together we will raise our voices and defend Solar 4 All, the myriad community benefits provided by IRA, and much, much more.
As we recognize the bright future of solar, we acknowledge darker headwinds. Regarding what is happening in DC, Bill McKibben recently wrote:
“The attacks on sensible energy policy have been swift and savage. We exited the Paris climate accords, paused IRA spending, halted wind and solar projects, gutted the effort to help us transition to electric vehicles, lifted the pause on new LNG export projects, canceled the Climate Corps just as it was getting off the ground, and closed the various government agencies dedicated to environmental justice. Oh, and we declared an ‘energy emergency’ to make it easier to do all of the above…. [And Big Oil now has a] firm grip on the controls of power. The question is how to erode that grip—which won’t happen in a week, or a year. It will take steady organizing, occurring against the stern backdrop of physics, which will be piling up climate damage even as we work. No easy answers or quick victories….”
This is where we are, and yet the future is full of possibilities. I’m reminded that when we started Climate Smart Missoula a decade ago, solar was crazy expensive and barely a drop in the energy bucket. I knew nothing of super-efficient heat pumps and didn’t know that methane gas was dirty and dangerous or that ten years in, across the world we’d be electrifying everything. I did know, however, it would take resolve and community to build a livable future.
Although New Year’s resolutions may have come and gone by now, it’s my hope that each of us can resolve to take action this year and this decade.
At Climate Smart Missoula, we remain resolved to accelerate solar and to enhance opportunities to connect it to batteries. We will bring on more heat pumps and more energy efficient buildings so those with fewer resources don’t have huge monthly energy bills.
We’re resolved to speak up for climate justice and smart policies at the local, state and national levels.
We’re resolved to plant and grow more trees, and we are so dedicated to clean air we are going to spend February 15 going up and down Mt Sentinel as many times as we can – hopefully with many of you – for the ever challenging and fun(!) RUFA - Running Up For Air. Join us!
Over the past couple months, I’ve been working my way through a new book by the ever-inspiring Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What If We Get It Right?, a book full of interviews which offer readers visions of climate futures and which I highly recommend. In her book, Johnson asks a fundamental question: What if we act as if we love the future?
Can we resolve to do just that?
As Rebecca Solnit offers: the future is what we make in the present and the way we get through this is together.
Amy Cilimburg is the executive director of Climate Smart Missoula. Climate Smart Missoula brings this Climate Connections column to you two Fridays of every month. Learn more about our work and sign up for our e-newsletter at missoulaclimate.org.