Thread by @doctorow

In *Electrify*, the MacArthur prizewinning engineer @GriffithSaul offers a detailed, optimistic and urgent roadmap for a climate-respecting energy transition that we can actually accomplish in 10-15 years.

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/pra…

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There are a lot of popular science books out there, but the world really needs more popular *engineering* books.

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These set out the technical parameters of our problems and the various proposed solutions, sorting the likely from the plausible to the foolish, and laying out a practical range of plans to accomplish the best of them.

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The first book like this I ever read was David McKay's superb 2009 "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air," a life-changing book that sets out the energy transition as an engineering problem.

memex.craphound.com/2009/04/08/sus…

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McKay describes the upper and lower bounds of the Earth's estimated carbon budget - how much CO2 we can emit. Then he looks at the energy budget for a variety of human activities - buildings, transport, food, and so on - decomposing each into a variety of subcategories.

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Then he looks at the maximum theoretical renewable energy generation available to us, by category - how many solar photons strike the Earth every day? That's your absolute solar limit.

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Then he gives you the knobs and dials to play with these figures - this kind of activity, plus this kind of renewable, requires this much raw material and space, and presents the following advantages and disadvantages.

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The remarkable thing about MacKay's book is that it becomes abundantly clear that while an energy transition is a lot of work, it's eminently possible. MacKay's book spawned a whole line of "Without the Hot Air" titles from UIT Cambridge.

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The latest, last year's "Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air," is an excellent continuation of MacKay's legacy:

pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/met…

Griffith's popular engineering book is also part of MacKay's legacy (in case there's any doubt, Griffith namechecks him).

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Electrify is far more concrete and granular than MacKay's book, focusing on the US context to understand what is possible, what is necessary, and what stands in the way.

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Griffith starts with some very good news: the US's energy budget has been wildly overstated. About *half* of the energy that the US consumes is actually the energy we need to dig, process, transport, store and use fossil fuels.

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Renewables have these costs, too, but nothing near the costs of using fossil fuels. An all-electric nation is about twice as efficient as a fossil fuel nation. That means that the problem of electrifying America is only half as hard as we've been told it was.

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There's more good news! Your car, stove, water heater, furnace and air conditioner are all super-inefficient, too. When you have electrified your life, everything you do will be cheaper, faster and better.

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A just energy transition isn't a transition to ecology austerity - you can have better, cheaper versions of the stuff you love.

Getting all this done will require a lot of money.

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Electrification is front-loaded: you spend a lot of money now to save a lot more money (oh, and the planet) later. That means that retrofitting our homes, replacing our appliances, and changing over our utilities will require large upfront investments.

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John Kerry calls this energy/resource mobilization "World War Zero," a comparison to the rapid, total conversion of the US economy to a war materiel economy after Pearl Harbor.

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Here, Griffith has still more good news. The WWII mobilization was proportionately much, much larger than the mobilization needed to win World War Zero.

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For Griffith, the roadmap is pretty straightforward. From now on, every time we replace a vehicle or renovate a building or swap an appliance, we should be buying electric. Every new roof should include solar panels. books that

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New housing should be energy efficient and shouldn't even have a gas hookup. All of this should be financed with low-cost, long-term loans.

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These are comparable to the government-backed mortgages that created the post-war middle-class (but without the racism that created Black housing precarity and poverty).

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No more fossil-fuel plants should be built, period. Existing extraction and refining programs should halt, now. Existing plants should be decomissioned and replaced with renewables and batteries.

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This should be federally funded, as should the new jobs for fossil-fuel-sector workers, whose labor the electrification project can handily absorb, with room to spare for every un- and under-employed person in America.

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The stuff we've been told is impossible with renewables - like maintaining base-load - is revealed as a largely solved problem (big batteries, which will get smaller and cheaper over time).

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Some of Griffith's solutions raised my eyebrows, particularly his plan to simply buy off the fossil fuel sector, giving them a fractional return on their stranded assets (book value minus the expected costs to realize them discounted by some kind of penalty percentage).

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This is basically the solution that Kim Stanley Robinson proposes in his brilliant Ministry For the Future. I hate it. But Griffith makes a good case for it, a kind of "would you rather be happy, or right?" conundrum.

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if you want to argue with him about it, I suggest you read the book first.

Other parts of Griffith's solutions surprised me.

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He points out specific elements of our public safety codes that can be amended to fall in line with standards adopted in Europe and Australia, which would represent a significant savings in the cost of solar conversions.

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There are a lot of wins like these, where Griffith points to something we can do for free, basically, and then says, "This knocks 2% off the total budget for winning World War Zero." Add up all those little wins and we're talking hundreds of billions in savings.

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Electrify opens up with a mildly disparaging view of the #GreenNewDeal as a kind of mushy and aspiration and nonspecific. I bridled at that at first, but by the end of Electrify, I got it - a green transition needn't be a bunch of slogans to be understood.

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It's possible to articulate a highly specific plan, fully shovel-ready, without being dull or so technical that only wonks can understand it. This is a book for everyone.

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If you've read this far, you're probably wondering about Griffith's takes on some of the contoversies within the green transition movement.

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He actually devotes a chapter to these: nuclear power (mmmmmmaybe); geoengineering (no), carbon capture (fuck no), hydrogen (don't be stupid), etc.

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Griffith writes with beautiful clarity, which will not surprise you if you've ever heard him speak; he has a real gift for simplifying ideas to the point where anyone can grasp them, but not so much that they lose nuance or coherence.

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One appendix is very moving - it's a list of marching orders for kids, voters, politicians, artists, musicians, writers, teachers, energy workers, engineers, bankers, oil execs, a sentence or two for each on what they can do, *now* to advance this program.

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As with everything Griffith makes, this advice sits at the intersection of practicality and visionary optimism. It's the precise mix that we need to survive this transition.

eof/