Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

by Saul Griffith

These big-ticket items in our households—cars, furnaces, water heaters, stoves, and dryers—along with our decisions about what to fuel them with, drive more than 40% of US emissions today. If we add small business and commercial business decisions around these same things—how we heat our offices and what fuels our company cars use—we are making the choices that create more than 60% of our emissions. This is why we need to understand each of these purchasing decisions as infrastructure. We can make them well and have a huge impact on our emissions. Environmentally concerned citizens today pay a lot of attention to small daily purchasing decisions and make complicated moral calculations about grocery bags, synthetic meat, vacation flights, and plastic packaging. Of course, every little bit counts, but this thinking, as we’ve seen, is mired in the efficiency framework of the 1970s (Reduce! Re-use! Recycle!). These purchasing decisions make a little difference but aren’t ambitious enough to solve our larger carbon problem.