Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.
If you're looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity's three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, underlined what we already know: the world is on a trajectory for destabilizing increases in temperature. The report is epic in scope and quality, the product of thousands of scientists volunteering long hours to sift through millions of pages of research. But it pales before the reports that nature issued this summer: record heat waves from Canada to the Mediterranean, record fires from California to Siberia, record floods from Belgium to Henan. If people in eastern US cities looked up from reading newspaper accounts of the IPCC report, they could see a smoky haze in the sky, the product of blazes a continent away.
That haze lets us see one thing more clearly: some of the solutions long on offer—from a carbon tax to changes in personal behavior—no longer qualify as enough, at least by themselves, since they won't work as quickly as physics demands. The IPCC has told us we need to cut emissions in half in this decade to have any hope of meeting the targets set in the Paris Agreement. There's one obvious route to reaching that goal, and it's the path that Saul Griffith describes in Electrify: we must immediately figure out how to electrify everything we do, and we must supply that electricity with non-carbon energy. The era of setting things on fire—coal, gas, oil, wood—to produce power must end. Instead, we'll have to rely almost entirely on the large flame that burns 93 million miles away.
Born in Australia and educated at MIT, Griffith is now a Californian. He's an engineer and inventor, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, and a serial entrepreneur; among other things, he founded Otherlab, a research and development firm that studies energy usage across the US, and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes the movement to "electrify everything." He's apparently also apolitical (which undermines his analysis, but more on that later). What he understands, above all, is where energy comes from in our world and how it's used. His highly detailed flow charts showing things like the energy demands of outpatient health clinics—roughly equal, we learn, to those of houses of worship—are scattered throughout the book, undergirding his analysis.
As his title suggests, Griffith is fairly single-minded. Electrification is to climate change as the vaccine is to Covid-19—perhaps not a total solution, but an essential one. He begins by pointing out that in the United States, combustion of fossil fuels accounts for 75 percent of our contribution to climate change, with agriculture accounting for much of the rest. (His charts, confusingly, use "CO2 emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions" interchangeably; given the emerging prominence of methane as the other significant greenhouse gas, this conflation is misleading, but not enough to dent the basic outline of his argument.) The US uses about 101 quadrillion BTUs (or "quads") of energy a year, and Griffith's data is so granular that he can tell you how much of that goes, for example, toward driving children to school and church (0.7 percent), flying military jets and transport planes (0.5 percent), or lighting billboards (0.005 percent). (continues)
Bill McKibben
If you're looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity's three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, underlined what we already know: the world is on a trajectory for destabilizing increases in temperature. The report is epic in scope and quality, the product of thousands of scientists volunteering long hours to sift through millions of pages of research. But it pales before the reports that nature issued this summer: record heat waves from Canada to the Mediterranean, record fires from California to Siberia, record floods from Belgium to Henan. If people in eastern US cities looked up from reading newspaper accounts of the IPCC report, they could see a smoky haze in the sky, the product of blazes a continent away.
That haze lets us see one thing more clearly: some of the solutions long on offer—from a carbon tax to changes in personal behavior—no longer qualify as enough, at least by themselves, since they won't work as quickly as physics demands. The IPCC has told us we need to cut emissions in half in this decade to have any hope of meeting the targets set in the Paris Agreement. There's one obvious route to reaching that goal, and it's the path that Saul Griffith describes in Electrify: we must immediately figure out how to electrify everything we do, and we must supply that electricity with non-carbon energy. The era of setting things on fire—coal, gas, oil, wood—to produce power must end. Instead, we'll have to rely almost entirely on the large flame that burns 93 million miles away.
Born in Australia and educated at MIT, Griffith is now a Californian. He's an engineer and inventor, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, and a serial entrepreneur; among other things, he founded Otherlab, a research and development firm that studies energy usage across the US, and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes the movement to "electrify everything." He's apparently also apolitical (which undermines his analysis, but more on that later). What he understands, above all, is where energy comes from in our world and how it's used. His highly detailed flow charts showing things like the energy demands of outpatient health clinics—roughly equal, we learn, to those of houses of worship—are scattered throughout the book, undergirding his analysis.
As his title suggests, Griffith is fairly single-minded. Electrification is to climate change as the vaccine is to Covid-19—perhaps not a total solution, but an essential one. He begins by pointing out that in the United States, combustion of fossil fuels accounts for 75 percent of our contribution to climate change, with agriculture accounting for much of the rest. (His charts, confusingly, use "CO2 emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions" interchangeably; given the emerging prominence of methane as the other significant greenhouse gas, this conflation is misleading, but not enough to dent the basic outline of his argument.) The US uses about 101 quadrillion BTUs (or "quads") of energy a year, and Griffith's data is so granular that he can tell you how much of that goes, for example, toward driving children to school and church (0.7 percent), flying military jets and transport planes (0.5 percent), or lighting billboards (0.005 percent). (continues)
Bill McKibben
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