An optimistic-but realistic and feasible-action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything.
Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now-but what? Proposed solutions seem either impossible or inadequate. In Electrify, Saul Griffith lays out a detailed action plan-optimistic but feasible-for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, have to stay and fight for the future. Griffith's plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible.
Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest "climate loans." Griffith's plan doesn't rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses-but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs-up to twenty-five million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We may have to change politics along with everything else.
