Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

Saul Griffith

Oct 2021 · MIT Press

About this ebook

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? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. 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. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.

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 can change politics along with everything else.

Ratings and reviews

Get past 1970's thinking! What do you want? A world worth living in! How do you get it? Saul Griffith shows what you can do to get everyone to a world that is stable and abundant and just. He is focused on the deadlines that Planet Earth sets. Not what politicians like to say is practical. Only flaw in the book is it underplays the potential of nuclear power to be redesigned to be immodestly cheaper and safer than the 1960's designs we rely on for about half of our clean energy today. There isn't a lot of 1960's technology we still use, and the lack of innovation due to regulatory failure can be fixed easily.

About the author

Saul Griffith, inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer, is founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2007.