Reviews
Electrify: An Optimists Playbook for our Clean Energy Future
By Saul Griffith. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 269 pages, 2021, Price $18.95 ISBN: 9780262545044 (paperback), ISBN: 9780262046237 (hardcover)
In Saul Griffith’s book, Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for our Clean Energy Future, the message is clear: To save our planet from climate change, let’s electrify everything. The time to do it was yesterday, and there’s no more time to waste. He argues this is technologically possible and even feasible, but there are political barriers that need to be overcome. The goal of 1.5/2 0F increase in global temperature is now only possible with negative emissions. We’ve already waited too long and can’t wait any longer. Solutions need to be in place decades before the worst consequences are felt. We already have committed emissions from locked in infrastructure which is just delaying the timeline even more. There is no time to buy just one more gas car or gas furnace before going electric.
The United States has a history of doing really great things and pulling off monumental tasks when it is in an emergency. Griffith claims that climate change is an emergency that needs to be treated on the same level and dealt with the same swift action as The New Deal, World War II mobilization, the space race, the civil rights movement, the 1973 energy crisis, smoking and public health, and ozone depletion.
The 1973 energy crisis gave us tools to be informed about today’s climate crisis. However, this crisis is different in that it can’t be solved with efficiency. We must completely change the supply to be 0% emissions, while also reducing the demand by using more efficient electrical machines. He provides a detailed breakdown of energy supply and demand for different sectors in Sankey diagrams, and points out the large thermoelectric losses with fossil fuels and how the fossil fuel supply chain is a major consumer of fossil fuels itself. He calls for huge transformative changes for good not small changes that result in less bad. For example, replacing fossil fuels with other fuels is not an option because creating the alternate fuels needs more electricity than just running an electric car. By electrifying everything it will reduce the total need by approximately half.
The sources of electricity also need to drastically change, relying most heavily on solar and wind power. However, depending on location, a mixture of wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, wave and tidal power, and offshore wind are all appropriate zero emissions options. The reliability of renewables specifically when it comes to the timing of supply and demand is a popular critique. Griffith argues again that this is a problem of organizing many things to work together, not an impossibility. If we electrify everything we will need 3-4 times the electrical energy. This will need a new grid, not a beefing up of the old one. So, let’s make the new one work with renewable energies while we are at it. He suggests various battery/energy storage systems to help even out the daily and seasonal variations in supply and demand. Chemical batteries can be used for variations of hours to weeks. Thermal energy storage such as freezing or heating water when electrical generation is high and then using stored thermal energy for water heaters, HVAC, and refrigerators later when energy production is low. Various mechanical storage options exist such as pumped hydro, flywheels, and compressed gas, but they aren’t grid scale. He also suggests shifting the timing of loads which is easier to do when everything is electric. Historically this was done to keep producing things at night so they wouldn’t need to shut down coal plants every night and restart in the morning. This kind of restructuring can be done again, but to match renewable generation peaks.
The new infrastructure will include new personal infrastructure such as cars, furnaces, water heaters, stoves, dryers, etc. He provides a detailed energy analysis of the average household across geographic and economic ranges of America. Using the average household a cost difference is calculated. The upfront costs are big, but electrifying will have lower long-term costs for overall cheaper energy. There need to be reasonable and realistic ways for individuals to make these purchases. Griffith proposes low interest long term “mortgage-like” loans. (It is important to note that when he wrote this mortgage rates were in the 3-4% range.)
There are already many fossil fuels in reserves. This means fossil fuel companies and stockholders of these companies have money tied up in the potential future us of these fuels. Not using them would cause widespread economic decline. He suggests divesting fossil fuel companies and buying out the stocks, not for their full values but at just a small profit margin.
To make electrifying an option, rules need to be reviewed and rewritten. Many rules were made to incentivize the use of fossil fuels and/or meant to work in the context of a fossil fuel burning world. Among the list of things to be revised are electric vehicle incentives and gas taxes, rooftop solar and building codes, fossil fuel subsidies, electrical codes, and grid neutrality.
Griffiths estimates that electrifying everything will approximately double the number of jobs in the energy sector in the near term. After much of the infrastructure changes have happened there will be a 5-6 million job increase over the 12 million energy sector jobs today. The location of these jobs is also important. Most of today’s energy jobs are in red states. The new jobs will be all over. For example, installing rooftop solar should happen everywhere. However, the majority of the jobs will still be in red states, because they have the land capacity for large renewable energy generation.
Electrifying everything won’t solve all of planet Earth’s environmental problems. The products of the electrified world need to last. When they don’t, they need to be recyclable. We can’t live with a throw-away mentality.
Approximately 20% of the book is dedicated to appendices that the author felt needed to be included but didn’t want to distract from the main message of the book. These appendices include responses to questions you might get asked when talking about this topic at a dinner party, a list of actionable items for people in a variety of careers, an overview of climate science, instructions on how to read a Sankey diagram (there are several in the book), and links to resources to do your own investigations.
Fighting World War Zero (Emissions) will require rallying for the cause and scaling up production like the nationwide mobilization efforts of World War II. It needs to be done in a smart, efficient and everyone-on-board kind of way. It needs to be done yesterday.
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, (MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2024). vii + 307 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-262-04880-4.
In their introduction, this trio of authors – professors of physics and astronomy, natural philosophy, and philosophy, respectively – write that “We believe that our perspective can help transform and revive our cherished scientific culture as it faces its greatest challenges while reshaping our worldview for a sustainable project of civilization.” (p. xi) They go on to write that “We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot,” (p. xi) and attribute it to “the failure to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge.” (p. xiv)
In their opening chapter the authors describe many of the characteristics of what they call the Blind Spot but they never get around to providing a concrete definition of what it is. Among other things, they criticize the Blind Spot’s bifurcation of nature (by focusing on measured rather than experienced quantities), reductionism (by attributing fundamentality of smallest parts over composites), and reification of mathematical identities (by ascribing reality to mathematical properties of objects). Throughout the book they continually refer to “four pathologies associated with the Blind Spot: (1) surreptitious substitution, (2) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, (3) reification of structural invariants, and (4) the amnesia of experience.” (p. 253)
The reification of mathematical descriptions takes particular aim at classical physics, which the authors typify as “a story of mathematical constructions that successfully built on, surpassed, and then forgot the role of lived experience.” (p. 39) Instead, they look more kindly on Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, which they characterize as an “attempt to find the right place for . . . abstractions within a full account of nature that includes our experience as an integral part of it.” (p. 82) When it comes to describing things in the quantum realm, which defies direct experience, they find two interpretations which they feel are compatible with their way of thinking: (1) relational quantum mechanics (RQM), in which the wave function is a mere calculational device and the only reality is its interaction with a measuring apparatus; (2) Quantum Bayesianism (QBism for short), which is grounded in Bayesian probabilities, which “represent a state of .. . belief . . . instead of a frequency or propensity of some phenomenon.” (p. 104) “QBism . . . together with elements of RQM, addresses the fundamental question posed by quantum mechanics: the relationship between properties of the world and our experiences of the world.” (p. 108) Cosmologically, the authors find that inflation and a multidimensional universe with strings are based on unjustified extrapolations beyond the realm of human experience: “If what we can say of the world depends on our experience of the world, to describe what lies beyond any possibility of experimental confirmation belongs to the realm of gods, not people.” (p. 137)”
This trio of authors distinguishes the living from the non-living in a trio of chapters – on life, cognition, and consciousness. Here their objection to reductionism plays a major role: “The Blind Spot perspective on life leans heavily on . . . reductionism . . . [that] life is nothing more than molecular machinery.” (p. 143) “It takes life to recognize life,” (p. 142) and “self-individuation, agency, and . . . autonomy . . make life unlike anything else in nature or anything we manufacture.” (p. 143)
When it comes to cognition, the authors feel that “the strongest and most prominent manifestation of the Blind Spot in cognitive science . . . [is] in AI.” (p. 165) “AI systems do not know anything about the world as such; instead, they detect statistical correlations in the input we give them with no understanding of what lies behind those correlations,” they write. (p. 180) To the authors the key to solving a problem is determining what information is relevant to the solution: “In trying to design an intelligent system . . . how do you design or program an agent so that it considers only the relevant information without wasting time on the irrelevant information?” (p. 167) “No AI system comes close to realizing relevance.” (p. 165)
In contrast to AI, the authors seem to look with favor on what they call “enactive cognitive science” for its “importance of the body and interactions with the environment for understanding the mind.” (p.164). “Enactive-cognition theorists embrace the irreducible primacy of direct experience and accordingly strive to move beyond the Blind Spot in their investigations of the mind.” (p.165)
The authors define the “hard problem of consciousness” as “explaining how a physical system, such as the brain, gives rise to conscious experience.” (p. 192) After describing and discounting three ways to account for consciousness in the Blind Spot worldview, they replace it with “the problem [of] how the brain as a perceptual object within consciousness relates to the brain as part of the embodied conditions for consciousness.” (pp. 219- 220) This realization “that we inescapably use consciousness to study consciousness” (p. 218) they, along with Francesco Varela, call “neurophenomenology,” which they say “represents probably the strongest effort so far to envision a neuroscience of consciousness beyond the Blind Spot.” (p. 221)
All of this leads up to a discussion of the future of planet Earth in the last chapter, which the authors promised in their introduction. “Global warming, driven by the industrial activity of the richest nations, is changing Earth’s climate in ways that will severely stress . . . humanity’s ten-thousand-year-old global project of civilization,” they write. (p. 225) “From Francis Bacon [whose goal of subjugating nature has already been cited on p. 11] on, developing the methods of inquiry we now call science was always aimed at the control of nature as at revealing reality and truth . . . . Energy was harvested and entropy generated on scales that would soon alter the function of the coupled Earth systems.” (pp. 226-227) “The basic assumptions of the Blind Spot became entrenched in the economic and social systems that came to dominate the period of rapid industrialization” (p. 227) – “a new planetary state . . . called the Anthropocene . . . that is likely to be far less hospitable to our project of civilization.” (p. 226)
From the work of Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia to Earth Systems Science, the authors recognize that the evolution of a planet gearing life is affected by the interaction of that life with the planet. With the climate change resulting from human injection of greenhouse gases, the authors “find the Blind Spot’s idea of reason, which claimed to speak for science, underpinning the political economy of the emerging Industrial Age.” (pp. 238-230)
The authors point out that wedded to the reification of mathematics in physics is the mathematization of economics and the Blind Spot that goes with it. They criticize the idealities that economics posits for pure competition and seem to resist acknowledging the redeeming features of efforts to account for environmental costs, much less than making an out-and-out call for a carbon tax.
Although science has been identified with the Blind Spot, the authors acknowledge that it “strives to be a self-correcting narrative built from a communal, open-ended, inquiry-focused dialogue with experience.” (p. 248) “We’ve already explored how [the] challenges [to the Blind Spot] have arisen in cosmology, quantum physics, biology, cognitive science, and the neuroscience of consciousness,” they continue. (p. 245) Their alternative to the Blind Spot perspective is a “unique mix” of physics, biology, and the social sciences called the “science of complex systems,” which are transdisciplinary nonreductionist "coevolving multilayer networks.” (p. 245) Their evolution depends on their history, environment, and “possibilities available conditioned on the present” – “the adjacent possible.” (p. 246) Determining the evolution of complex systems requires and is enabled by computers.
“By embracing . . . a nonreductionist perspective that focuses on the centrality of entangled, looping relations and their emergent properties in complex systems . . . complex system science offers a glimpse of what a scientific worldview beyond the Blind Spot might look like.” (p. 249) But although this book has examined “possible gateways into post-Blind Spot perspectives,” (p. 253), it makes no specific claim for an “alternative to the Blind Spot.” (p. 253)
John L. Roeder
The Calhoun School
JLRoeder@aol.com
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