Solving Climate Change the American Way: Saul Griffith’s Vision for an Electric Future

Venture Capital Solving Climate Change the American Way: Saul Griffith’s Vision for an Electric Future Steve Vassallo Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. General Partner at Foundation Capital Jun 14, 2022, 11:10am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin (AUSTRALIA OUT) Saul Griffith is an American-Australian inventor and physicist based in Austinmer on . .

. [+] the South Coast of NSW. Through his companies, Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia, he advises the US and Australian governments on climate policy, August 12 2021.

(Photo by James Brickwood/The Sydney Morning Herald via Getty Images) Fairfax Media As a venture investor, I have the privilege of meeting amazing people. But there’s one group of individuals who I think are something else. Women and men who are supremely talented, endlessly curious, passionately committed, and unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries.

I think people like these are uniquely designed to solve the world’s most critical and intractable problems. I refer to these extraordinary folks as “missionary misfits,” and every so often, I’ll introduce readers to one of them. Saul Griffith is many things — an inventor, an environmentalist, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, and a founder.

But in my mind, Saul is one of those rare people who is both practical and an optimist. He got his Ph. D.

from MIT in 2004, studying the intersection between materials science and information theory; it was clear even then that he fit the description of the missionary misfit. Which is why after he left the MIT Media Lab to move West, I recruited him to join us at Foundation Capital for a stint as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in 2009. Since then, he’s led projects for various government agencies, including NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation, and United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

He’s started successful tech companies in Silicon Valley (too many to list here), and he’s the author of two books, Electrify and The Big Switch , both of which offer blueprints for countries to shift their economies to run on clean energy. The projects he’s most passionate about focus on creative approaches to making the world better right now and preserving it for the future; his research lab, Otherlab , works with huge companies on their efforts to decarbonize and achieve energy efficiency. And his nonprofit, Rewiring America , focuses on making the switch to renewable energy fast , as a means not only to achieve climate goals, but to provide jobs and lower costs for Americans.

I spoke with Saul about his vision for an electric future, and what it will take to get there. When did it become clear to you that addressing climate change would be your life’s work? It might have been while my mother was breastfeeding me, as she was protesting the whales being killed. It’s in my blood.

I’ve been passionate about climate change my entire life. The first time I really engaged, though, was when I was 19 and protested for Australia to sign the Kyoto agreement. I was arrested for blockading the Sydney Harbour Bridge to traffic on a Friday afternoon.

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There’s a mindset that technology will save us, but we’ve been waiting for that miracle technology for so long that to meet our current climate targets, we need 100% adoption rates of clean energy technology starting last year. What I mean by a 100% adoption rate is that every time anyone in the world buys a car starting tomorrow, it needs to be electric. We can’t buy natural gas furnaces to heat our homes anymore.

We can’t buy any new power plants that run on fossil fuels. The good news is that the miracle technologies will come along. And batteries, solar, wind power, and electric vehicles exist already – just not at the capacity we need.

But by scaling these technologies, implementing renewable technology in homes and offices, we can buy ourselves time to address climate change in a more substantial way. What’s holding us back from achieving that? There’s this revenge fantasy that we will get back at the fossil fuel companies for getting us into this predicament. What this story leaves out is that everyone in society was burning fossil fuels, including most environmentalists.

It turns out that fossil fuels are ingrained in our financial system: we financialized fossil assets in the early 20th century, and these standard assets impose a huge opportunity cost on switching to renewable energy. The problem is not that we don’t have the technology to make these changes, but that abandoning these assets would leave an enormous amount of money on the table and render millions of dollars of equipment obsolete. So solving this ingrained structural practice, in my opinion, will come down to something beyond technology.

We need to think out of the box and consider crazy solutions, for example, why don’t we just devalue the current currency in order to buy out the proven reserves. Yes, this would give existing fossil fuel companies an enormous advantage in the new energy economy, since they would gain liquid capital to redeploy into new technologies. But I would take that bargain in a heartbeat to have a functional civilization.

What can consumers do that actually moves the needle? The conversation isn’t sexy, and this is why Silicon Valley was distracted by all of these bright, shiny objects instead of actually working on problems that matter. The average hot water heater lasts 14 years, the average air conditioner lasts for 12 years, and a roof lasts 15 – 20 years. You need these things to be replaced, ideally with renewable technology.

But even if you mandated renewable upgrades, we do not have the global rate of production necessary to provide these things at scale. If America had the wisdom and organization that it had during World War II, they’d recognize this as a problem of similar size and opportunity. In that case, we would have a much stronger private-public partnership with the government.

They would scale up American manufacturing to produce solar cells, batteries, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. But on an individual level, consumers do have the power to make decisions. There are 130 million homes in America, and each makes five or six decisions every decade that determine whether that household emits carbon or not.

What is heating your hot water heater? What vehicles are in your driveway? What is on your roof? What is your roof made out of? We need to start to anticipate when those households are making that small number of decisions, and we need to make sure that there is financing available to deploy these technologies. Fifty percent of air conditioners and hot water heaters are bought under financial duress — you’re buying after an unprecedented failure — and most people choose the cheapest option on the floor. Renewable technologies that cost more upfront will save that person money over 20 years, so we need to offer financing that makes that transition possible.

Where are we seeing adoption of these renewable energy appliances, and how can we encourage more consumers to make the switch? Sunrun has been able to tell the conservation story to households for whom the electricity price is not significant to their economics, but we need to mobilize the entire population. Similarly, Silicon Valley has done an incredible job of making a climate solution for the 5%. But we can’t solve climate change if only the top 5% can afford it.

Getting to 100% will be uncomfortable for Silicon Valley because it means engaging with the government on fixing the regulatory environment. But provided that we can create a regulatory environment that subsidizes the cost of rooftop solar and eliminates the hurdles to installing induction cook stove and natural gas burners, these options will save American households thousands of dollars. The average household has a median income of $61,000 and spends six to nine percent of it on energy.

That comes out to more than most households spend on education. With a focus on household savings through renewables, I can imagine even the Republican party winning on a climate platform in 2024: a platform of American innovation and the success of a new energy sector. That’s how we can solve climate change the American way.

Do you believe that these consumer decisions can, on a person-by-person level, affect real change? I don’t believe we’re going to change consumer behavior enormously or overnight, but I do believe we can change it a little bit. I don’t think society appreciates how quickly things can change. Things don’t have to be as they were.

For example, I often ask people when they think we went to a standard five-day workweek. People guess the 17th, 18th, or 19th century, but it was actually the 1950s. We got an extra weekend day within living memory.

We do have the power to move the needle. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn . Check out my website .

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