As the futurist Alex Steffen has incisively put it, in a Twitter performance that functions as a “Powers of Ten” for the climate crisis, the transition from dirty electricity to clean sources is not the whole challenge. It’s just the lowest-hanging fruit: “smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power,” Steffen says, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided—given that
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