Boston is an inspiring place to be in the face of the wannabe authoritarianism of Trump 2.0. Particularly in the older parts of the city, one comes across sign after sign to remind you that this is where Americans rose up 250 years ago to reject the very idea of rule by a king in favor of establishing a government of, by, and for the people.

The city’s many statues and monuments also make clear that the people of Boston stayed true to the spirit of liberty and justice for all after the Revolution of 1776. By 1783, slavery had been outlawed across Massachusetts. Boston remained a hotbed of the abolitionist movement throughout the 1800s as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other movement leaders gathering there to develop strategy, raise funds, and rouse citizens to action. And while many cities in the North erected monuments after the Civil War to honor their war dead, the monuments built in Boston made a point of commemorating both the white and the Black men who fell in a war that, as the Soldiers and Sailors Monument that towers above the Boston Common emphasizes, “destroyed slavery and maintained the Constitution.”

Last Saturday night, some of today’s abolitionists—activists who are trying to abolish not slavery but rather the burning of fossil fuels that puts humanity’s future in such grave peril—assembled in Boston’s Old North Church. It was in the steeple of that church that, in an episode taught to all American schoolchildren, lanterns were hung on April 18, 1775—“one if by land, two if by sea”—so Paul Revere could warn the Sons of Liberty in the town of Lexington, “The British are coming, the British are coming,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem later put it.

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The fossil fuel abolitionists, including Nation contributor Bill McKibben and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, hung a different kind of lantern in the steeple: a green lantern, to announce plans for “Sun Day,” a global day of action taking place September 20 and 21, coinciding with the autumnal equinox. In McKibben’s words, Sun Day will celebrate “the fact that we can now run this world without fossil fuels: Imagine EV and e-bike parades, green lights in the window of every solar-powered home, big concerts and rallies, joyful ceremonies as new solar farms and wind turbines go on line.”

Sun Day also aligns with The 89 Percent Project, a yearlong initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now that The Nation helped launch last week. The project brings together news organizations around the world including The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Welle, Corriere della Sera, and The Asahi Shimbun to explore a pivotal but little-known fact: The overwhelming majority of the world’s people—80 to 89 percent, according to recent scientific studies—want their governments to take stronger climate action. This majority, however, does not realize it is a majority, in part because that fact is not reflected in most news coverage or on social media.  

Like Sun Day, The 89 Percent Project invites people to recognize the power they have “to begin the world over again,” as Revere’s fellow revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote—to leave behind fossil fuels and the frightful future they promise and instead embrace cleaner, safer, and more just ways of organizing society.

In his remarks, reproduced with permission below, to the ecumenical service that preceded the hanging of the green lantern in the Old North Church steeple, McKibben drew on the teachings of the recently deceased Pope Francis to describe the challenges and opportunities ahead.

—Mark Hertsgaard
 

Today is a very joyous occasion. It marks the start of a five-month push to reconfigure how Americans think about energy. If we our job well between now and Sun Day on September 20 and 21, then the word of this new revolution will spread out from this place to a thousand cities and towns, just as it did in April of 1775.

But you have to forgive me for a moment of sadness at the start. The world laid Pope Francis to rest this morning. I’m not a Catholic; I’d only met him once, and then briefly. But to borrow from a different mythos, I feel a large hole in the Force today.

In his encyclical Laudato Si’, the intellectual peak of his papacy, he laid out better than anyone before or since the deep connection between climate change and vulnerability. He understood, I think, that of all the ways we’ve thought of to oppress each other—racism, colonialism…—nothing quite matched making it impossible for people to live and grow food in the places where they were born.

I’ve been chronicling that sad story my whole life. And the thing limiting action all those years has been one simple fact: Fossil fuel was so cheap that no one was willing to give it up. Well, fossil fuel is still pretty cheap, but the news of the last few years is that, suddenly, thanks to great engineering and great activism, energy from the sun is cheaper.

As of three or four years ago, we crossed some invisible line, and now we live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And the second cheapest way is to take advantage of the fact that the sun heats the earth differentially, producing the winds that turn those majestic turbines.

Bottom line: The sun already gives us light and warmth and photosynthesis. Now, it’s also willing to provide us with all the power we could ever use—and without destroying the earth. That is a blessing of extraordinary dimension.

Now, this is a multifaith service, with people of many persuasions, and no persuasion. I’m a Methodist, which means I don’t worship the sun—S-U-N—I save my deepest veneration for the son, S-O-N. But I like the sun. It’s the most charismatic object in the physical universe, the thing that lifts every mood when it peeks from behind a cloud.

And now it comes to free us. From the worst of climate change—we can’t stop global warming, but if we build out renewable energy as fast as possible, we may be able to stop it short of the place where it cuts civilizations off at the knees.

But also from the scourge of air pollution. Nine million people die each year, one death in five on this planet, from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuels, mostly those particulates that lodge in lungs. That’s all unnecessary.

And also free us from the fact that as long as we depend on coal and oil and gas, which are available in a few scattered deposits, the people who control those places will end up with too much money and power, which they will then abuse—be they the Koch brothers, our biggest oil and gas barons, who used their winnings to degrade our democracy, or the king of Saudi Arabia, or Vladimir Putin who used his oil cash to launch a land war in Europe in the 21st century. We don’t need any of this. Imagine a world run on wind and sunshine (and the batteries to store them when the wind drops or the sun goes down). This power can’t be hoarded or held indefinitely in reserve; no war will ever be fought for control of the sun.

I think Pope Francis had that same affection, which is why he took the title of Laudato Si from the first words of St Francis of Assisi’s “Cantile of the Sun.” And why, last summer, he published another letter, this one titled “Fratello Sole,” Brother Sun. In it he promised that the Vatican would soon be powered entirely by an agri-voltaic solar array on the outskirts of Rome—those panels would provide “the complete energy sustenance of Vatican city-state,” making it the first nation on earth to run entirely off the sun.

Our goal for the United States as we plan and promote Sun Day in September is less sweeping, perhaps—we’d settle, this year, for changes in the laws that make it easier to build sun and wind. And for a new understanding that this is no longer “alternative energy,” but the obvious way forward. That will require immense amounts of activism, which we begin tonight. Join us at Sunday.earth.

Let me close with a bit of that poem from St. Francis that so inspired his namesake the late pope:

Be praised my Lord through all your creatures,
especially Sir Brother Sun
Who brings the day, and you give light through him
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor.

—Bill McKibben