Bookbuster Review: Electrify!
by TIM BARTON
There’s many a slip between a cup and a lip, indeed. Griffiths has subtitled his book ‘an optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future’. He is at pains to be very upfront about political obstacles: they are not in his scopes here, only the technological issues concern him, he says. What is technically possible, and what is best technologically, is what he wants us to realise. How we might achieve it financially is also addressed.
But how we may get there politically is left to others (or is it?).
It is refreshing to see a positive and thought-through action plan based on what is already technically feasible and necessary. The author has a dismissive approach to several trendy options big business push for, whether geo-engineered, carbon-sequestered, hydrogen-driven, bio-fuelled, or fusion-powered. I applaud this, and recommend reading his reasoning. The combination of ‘business as usual’, procrastination, and profiteering is toxic, and almost all their obsessions are not sustainable or green except in their ads and with the most cursory of glances.
WE’LL USE ABOUT HALF THE ENEGY WE CURRENTLY USE
The actions Griffiths advocates are mostly encapsulated in the title – Electrify!
Yes, electricity will, as he says throughout the book, need to serve ‘(almost all) of our needs’. His figures and action plan are expressly American, but he is quite adamant that they are scalable to other countries, indeed, the whole planet. He did say he was an optimist! He talks through a number of very serious, consequential, even radical necessary transitions, and argues, from a technical standpoint that not only are they doable with current means, but also within the one to two decade window necessary to have a hope in hell of curbing even more climate chaos than is already ‘locked-in’.
I urge you to read his book for these analyses alone, especially in relation to his urgent call to stop wasting time, money and resources on hydrogen, sequestration, biofuels and fusion.
However, context is everything, and despite his passing over ‘political obstacles’ for others to worry about, he does bend to a couple of deeply worrying ‘political’ assumptions. Although not speaking overtly of the ‘Overton window’, certain aspects of his targets for energy provision fall well within the blinkered ideology of the ‘politically possible’. ‘Americans will never fully support decarbonisation if they believe it will lead to widespread deprivation’, he says, which whilst painfully true shouldn’t be pandered to at the expense of his overall plan for change. He claims we can produce enough, sustainably, so as to maintain a western (American) lifestyle, an assumption, let’s face it, which is easily debunked.
FOSSIL FUEL EXTRACTION MUST STOP
American culture is allergic to ‘socially just’ solutions, and obviously he is correct in the impulse to keep a close weather eye on public expectations, although doing so in the way he does gives significant ground up to the political arena. Speaking as a realist one must question some of his more wilfully naïve assumptions.
Although being quite definitely of the opinion that fossil-fuel extraction must stop pretty much completely, and that the extraction of alternative energy sources will be a whole lot less destructive in aggregate, a view I think he argues well for, he still fails to address fundamental environmental and biospheric issues. The most glaring of these relate to the finitude of resources, the effects of already locked-in biospheric degradation, and the degree to which minerals needed for transition are located in a variety of problematic environments, from politically unstable countries such as Congo, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and relatively pristine environments, such as the mid-Pacific seabed (where the US expects to bulldoze vast fields of lithium).
These issues make it clear that there is no way to meet public expectations of ‘no pain, all gain’, far from it.
PUT OUR ENERGY INTO LOCALISING RESOURCES
Nevertheless, his technical arguments are very interesting. His positioning of transition in terms of finance and employment are important, and, yes, ultimately show the potential for some positive fruits of optimism to emerge. Overall, Griffith has put forward an exciting plan for a clean energy future, a future that needs to be as close to now as possible.
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