Do we have the technologies in hand to decarbonize economies in ways that are compatible with how people want to live?
Saul Griffith, inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer, is founder and chief scientist of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything. He is also founder and chief scientist at Otherlab, an independent R&D lab that has incubated numerous technology companies in sustainable energy and robotics. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007. He completed his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004.
The author of numerous scholarly papers, Saul’s book, Electrify, was published by MIT Press in October, 2021.
Politicians from around the world are in Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. That the disastrous impacts of climate change are increasingly evident is testimony to many things, not least the practical shortcomings of the first 25 UN meetings. Why are we where we are? The science is clear; politics, much less so.
But do we know what to do? Do we have the technologies in hand to decarbonize economies in ways that are compatible with how people want to live? Can we do this?
Saul Griffith, Australian inventor and engineer—and a past winner of the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize—insists that the answer is emphatically yes. We don’t need technological miracles, he says; we have all the technology we need to transform the United States from laggard to leader in the effort to change the arc of the warming climate. And, if the United States can do it, everyone can.
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A success story is available from Torsten Schreiber , founder of the Solartainer 🙂
The political establishment has gone worst than we ever thought. The fight against climate change has been a mirage. Our leaders failed woefully to address the challenges in an effort to tackling climate change. A money-making machine, taking millions of dollars through the back door. Well, this is easy, they should be able to tell us what they’ve done so far. UN, as a great global organization outlined many measures backed with data to specifically deal with climate change. On several meetings, detailed reports on financial malfeasance was recorded with several projects across the world. This is a worrying situation. Clearly, UN is now running on one foot.
I would not want to go far. Let’s talk another time.