Climate watch: Electrifying facts about climate change

If I had a child preparing for college, I’d suggest majoring in electrical engineering. The future of that field seems bright to me for the ironic reason that the future of the Earth looks dark. Climate change is a serious threat in this century, sooner rather than later, and the best way to meet it now is to “electrify everything.”

That is the plain advice of a smart man, Saul Griffith, a 2007 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a “genius grant.” He has applied his genius to the problem of climate change in a lively little book entitled “Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future” (MIT Press, 2021).

It is essential to power our modern society almost wholly with electricity and to produce all that electricity from renewable resources such as wind and solar.

Two serious problems lie in our path. First, to power so much with electricity will require not only replacing all our existing power plants driven by fossil fuels with plants that work from renewable sources of power — but also tripling the amount of electricity we currently produce.

Second, we need to bring about that transformation now — but many of the machines and electrical sources needing replacement are capital and durable goods. That is to say, they are expensive and last a long time. No one much wants to replace them before we get our money’s worth out of them.

These problems are suited to Griffith’s genius as an entrepreneur and engineer and to his outlook as a rather cheerful optimist, not a common description for many people trying to face the challenge of climate change.

He is also an inventor and knows firsthand how essential financial backing is.

As do many others who feel the urgency and enormity of the challenge of climate change, Griffith takes inspiration from the New Deal. But he does more than invoke the warm glow of Franklin Roosevelt’s old slogan. The first words in the book are, “This is an emergency as serious as war itself” — President Roosevelt’s characterization of the Great Depression. And Griffith seems even more inspired by the later “Arsenal of Democracy” mobilization for World War II. He highlights agencies and programs from the New Deal and the war that offer model solutions for modern problems posed by climate change.

Simply put, many of us are not able or willing to change to electricity right now. I purchased a new gas furnace for my house three years ago. It has more than a decade of life in it. I’m worried about the planet, all right, but do I have to buy another furnace just now? There are myriad decisions like that one. People will ask, should I replace my new SUV with an all-electric vehicle right now? And where will I find the money?

In response Griffith invokes programs of the New Deal. Agencies such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation saved families in financial trouble and preserved their middle-class status. The Electric Home and Farm Authority financed kitchen appliances for entry into middle-class convenience. And so it went. Similar government loan programs could accelerate the retirement of our fossil fuel-powered modern world.

I have attended many meetings on climate change, but do not recall any discussion of low-interest government loans at any of them. Saul Griffith, with his visionary yet generally practical approach to the problem of climate change deserves our attention.