Music, Culture, Arts and Entertainment 9-27-2021

#ElectrifyEverything! We spend the hour talking with Saul Griffith about his new book, Electrify: An Optimists Playbook For Our Clean Energy Future.

It’s about how we can solve the climate crisis, live well and save money by electrifying everything—and powering that electricity with clean energy.

Time to solve the climate crisis is running short. This week, UN  secretary general, António Guterres,  warned that with Member States’ current emission reduction commitments, “the world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7 degrees of heating.”  That would almost certainly result in runaway global warming that would render our Earth uninhabitable.

That horrific scenario is what scientist, engineer, entrepreneur and energy expert Saul Griffith is determined to forestall. He says our failure to fix climate change is just a failure of imagination; we have to tools right now to make the transition that will lead to vastly cheaper, cleaner energy with no loss in our standard of living. And it gives us a good chance at surviving the climate emergency.

Sound too good to be true? Griffith lays it all out in impressive detail in his book Electrify. It’s a manual with a message: if we get the government policy right, every American household can make the transition to clean energy by the latter half of this decade—and save an average of $2500 per year. But we need federal and state governments to step up to the plate to help everybody do it, no matter their income.

Saul Griffith is advising the White House on energy policy. He says we need to pass at the minimum, the climate provisions of the two infrastructure bills now in Congress. Waiting will cost us not only billions, not only lives but our futures, as well.

Saul Griffith is the co-founder of Rewiring America, which is working to launch a movement that electrifies everything. He is also the founder and chief scientist at Other Lab.