Maybe the weather, soggy and leaden, was prophetic that May morning nearly 50 years ago.

The Baltimore Sun had dispatched me to cover the first national Sun Day from atop Maine’s Cadillac Mountain, where the continental U.S. first spins into light.

Sun Day was designated by President Jimmy Carter to promote a switch to solar and wind energy. “Nobody can embargo sunlight, no cartel controls the sun [and] it will not pollute,” Carter told a rained-soaked crowd in Golden, CO.

Carter was so right, but a couple of years later President Ronald Reagan had stripped his predecessor’s solar hot water panels from the White House.

In hindsight, economics and technology back then cut mercilessly against a significant turn toward renewable energy. Nor was fossil-fueled climate change yet alarming.

That’s all changed now, to the point that advances in solar and wind and battery storage make President Trump’s “drill baby, drill” as unlikely to succeed as Carter’s sunnier ambition back in 1978.

Just in the last few years, energy from above has emerged as a universal winner over energies from the depths, cheaper and more efficient across the board, and the best answer to climate change. Solar and wind are now on pace to supply more than half the world’s total energy needs by the 2040s. A couple of our states — blue California and red Texas — are among the world leaders in deployment of these renewable energy sources.

“[It has] nothing to do with politics. It’s the economy, plain and simple … the price flip [favoring renewables] is epochal, the fastest energy transition in history.”

So said noted author and solar activist, Bill McKibben, at a recent session in the District of Columbia promoting his latest book, Here Comes the Sun.

The book is as inspiring as the most popular Beatles song, whence came its title, but also cautionary. While there’s little doubt renewable energy will win out, McKibben says, it’s going to be “on the bleeding edge of possible” to deploy it fast enough to cut the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2030 or so.

That’s what the best science says is needed to avoid severe impacts from climate change.

“Before the decade is out, we have to break the back of the fossil fuel system,” he writes. “[We] have to land the sun on Earth.”

That’s going to take less quibbling among environmentalists than many might like about the inevitably dirty mining of lithium for batteries. (Eventually, lithium can all be recycled.)

And then there are solar panels covering fertile farmland, a prickly issue around the Chesapeake Bay watershed and other regions. McKibben notes that we already put nearly half the nation’s corn in our gas tanks, a disastrous, politically driven policy that meets just 3% of our energy needs.

The same acreage in solar panels would meet more than 100% of energy needs, he says.

And China? Well, with its commanding lead in production of solar equipment, it’s likely to be “the Saudi Arabia of sun,” McKibben writes.

But that won’t necessarily give the Chinese the same outsize influence of present-day Saudi Arabia in a petrochemical world. Indeed, the most interesting and hopeful part of what McKibben has to say is how moving toward sun and wind power will be more equitable for humanity.

That’s because you can’t own the sun, as you can underground oil and gas and coal. There will be no Exxon or Koch brothers of sunlight, he argues.

Here’s one of his examples: Currently, 40% of the Earth’s ship traffic moves oil and gas and coal across oceans. “The sun does that automatically as it moves horizon to horizon.”

Solar lends itself to decentralized energy. Rural folk in Pakistan have in the last few years hugely cut dependence on diesel fuel by simply laying out grids of cheap solar panels from China across fields, relying on YouTube to learn how to wire them up.

Europeans have deployed millions of “balcony” solar panels, hung from the sides of houses and plugged into standard outlets (only Utah currently permits this in the U.S.).

This echoes Carter in 1978: “No cartel controls the sun.” Indeed, listen to McKibben’s answer to the question he hears most often — why doesn’t Big Oil just buy up and transform itself to Big Solar? “Basically,” he says, “they don’t because there isn’t as much profit to them.”

That also means, he says, that free markets alone won’t drive renewable energies fast enough. Government subsidies will be needed.

The pushback to renewable energy from fossil fuel industries, he writes, is only partly about money. It is about control. Solar, he contends, is “anti-fascist.”

McKibben agrees with the environmental mainstream that rooftops and parking lots should be priority locations for solar panels. It’s about four times cheaper to do in Europe, he says, mainly because they’ve streamlined building codes and regulations.

Nuclear power, he thinks, can play a role in providing energy because it emits no carbon dioxide, but the years it takes to develop a new plant (or a new oil or gas field, for that matter) makes it less promising in the near term.

“You can build a solar farm in weeks,” he says. Clearly, we must build many now.

“What were we doing when we unchained this Earth from its sun?”

McKibben reminds us of that question, which philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asks in his 1882 Parable of a Madman, written about a century into the fossil fuel era. The parable is more remembered for its conclusion: “God is dead.”

The views expressed by opinion columnists are not necessarily those of the Bay Journal.