The policy of renewable energies becomes foreign. The “Sun Day” celebrates them anyway.
Electric bikes playing in the streets of the city. The afternoon light shone clusters of floating solar panels. The neighbors guiding visitors to the houses warmed by heat pumps, the battery storage systems shone on the walls.
These resemble scenes from a clean energy exhibition or a novel of science fiction, but they are neither. These are only a few of the hundreds of events planned for “Sun Day”, a new national day of September 21 intended to celebrate the momentum of clean technology – and to face the political and institutional barriers slowing its larger adoption.
The optimism of the celebrations of this technological progress in this world is slightly in contradiction with the current policy surrounding clean energy. Under President Donald Trump, the United States has doubled on fossil fuels in the name of an “energy emergency”. The administration has extended the lifespan of polluting power plants, the inhabitants of electricity do not want and overthrew the tax credits on clean energy adopted under former president Joe Biden. It is not only the federal government – certain local states and governments have also adopted rules, which makes it more difficult to approve renewable energy projects.
However, despite the wind contrary winds, Clean Energy has made real progress, which Sun Day aims to put in the center and the center. Last year, 96% of the new power plant capacity built in the United States was carbon-free, mainly from solar energy, battery and wind energy. Wind turbines and solar are the cheapest sources of electricity today, even without federal subsidies.
This change has changed the game, according to Bill McKibben, an author and climate activist for life which is the spearhead of the Sun Day.
“For most of the history of the climate movement, we operated in a world where fossil fuels were cheap and renewable energies were expensive,” said McKibben. “Now we live in a world where economic gravity points in the other direction.”
As much as the Sun Day seems futuristic, it is also all all about nostalgia. The idea itself recovers almost 50 years. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed on May 3 as “Sun Day” and people across the country celebrated the dawn of “solar age”. In Washington, DC, the event attracted 20,000 people, more than the day of origin of the earth in 1970. Events included the search for a solar energy stove. A year later, Carter climbed on the roof of the White House to show 32 newly installed solar water heating panels – not the common photovoltaics today, but similar devices that capture thermal energy – announcing that the plans for the country obtain 20% of Renewable electricity by 2000.
The United States has finally struck this reference – but not on the chronology provided by Carter. While the Government initially paid money into the development of solar and wind energy after the gas prices have skyrocketed following the 1973 OPEC oil shock, the federal fervor for “alternative energy” did not last during the next decade.
Carter’s successor, President Ronald Reagan, reduced federal resources to develop solar and wind energy. During a renovation of the White House in 1986, its administration even destroyed the heating panels of solar water that Carter had put in place, ostensibly in the context of “roof repairs” – but given its well -known support for the fossil fuels industry, people read symbolism. Solar energy has only reappeared in the White House again after the beginning of the century, when President George W. Bush installed photovoltaic panels and solar radiators for the swimming pool and a maintenance building, but without ceremony. In 2013, President Barack Obama installed more solar panels on the roof of the building, accompanied by his intention announced to stimulate American solar energy.
Aside from the wars of improving the house of the White House, solar energy has long been a technology that Americans generally support. According to 2020, 90% of American adults were in favor of the expansion of solar energy, according to the Pew Research Center survey. But a growing partisan fracture erodes this common ground. Republicans are now much less favorable to the expansion of wind and solar energy than they were only five years ago and, consequently, the support of Americans to solar energy slipped to 77%.
“This fracture in renewable energies does not seem really specifically on the facts – it is more of their feelings,” said Serena Kim, data scientist and researcher at North Carolina State University. Earlier this year, his study analyzing millions of messages on Twitter revealed that the share of publications on social networks painting Solar in a negative light quadrupled between 2016 and 2022 (it was before Elon Musk took over and transformed the platform into X). Kim found that support for solar energy was declining in republican areas and across the south.
However, the clean energy policy is not as simple as right and left. “It’s everywhere,” said McKibben. “I don’t think it easily adapts to an ideological spectrum.” Some environmentalists are concerned about major solar projects that cross animal habitats; Meanwhile, improbable allies, including breeders, veterans and even petroleum and gas interests, have come together to block or weaken invoices with renewable development. In Texas, the state where clean energies develop the fastest and fastest republican legislators have worked to protect the renewable energies of a particularly restrictive bill this year.
Solar technology itself has a libertarian penchant. “It is no longer independence is local control – all that right -wing libertarians want,” said Daniel Kammen, energy scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
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He says that part of the resistance to the transition to renewable energies can be rooted in irrational logic, a nostalgia for fossil fuels that has stayed in the American imagination. “We have a state of mind that this world of dirty energy is inexpensive, available and plays in the American path,” said Kammen.
But climate defenders point out that the price of fossil fuels has long been kept artificially low, partly due to industry efforts to avoid paying environmental and social costs associated with their continuous use. To remedy this situation, activists have adopted strategies such as prevailing corporate companies for extreme damages and plead for a price on carbon dioxide which reflects its environmental damage. Others have turned to direct action, increasing the costs of fossil fuel companies by delaying or interrupting new pipeline projects before being completed.
Jamie Henn, founder and executive director of the non -profit non -profit media, said the emphasis put by the day for the defense of clean energy is an addition to this older strategy, not a pivot. “It seemed that the most important role for defenders was to retain the expansion of fossil fuels until clean energy could catch up and be ready for prime hours,” he said. “And now we’re here.”
But even before it occurs, the Sun Day 2025 has already sparked a debate – some say that its optimistic prospects seem naive in the second Trump, while others maintain that its embrace of nostalgia for the 1970s will not manage to bring new people on board. The entire “Sun Day” framing was actually a little french: the theme was initially “Sky Day,” said McKibben, but the graphic designers working on the logo had trouble drawing an image of the sky. They continued to draw the sun instead.
The way the organizers see it, Sun Day is a chance to help ban outdated perceptions on solar energy and wind. MCKIBBEN hopes that the event will help the public stop thinking about clean energy as a premium lifestyle choice; More like whole foods of energy, but costco.
“What we wanted to do is underline the new reality that is no longer a question of” alternative energy “, as we have called it for 40 years,” he said. “It is now the means of common sense, obvious and simple to propel the world.”
