Electrify by Saul Griffith

Author:Saul Griffith [Griffith, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: climate change; electrify everything; rewiring america; global warming; global warming solutions; climate change solutions; renewable energy; solve global warming; climate action; clean energy; clean energy plan; solar energy; clean energy transition
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

14

Rewrite the Rules!

Fighting climate change involves the long, hard, tedious work of changing thousands of regulations.

Australia is proof that rooftop solar would provide the cheapest energy, if only the US got rid of outdated regulations.

Building and electrical codes need to be updated to support, rather than conflict with, clean-energy technology.

We must end all fossil-fuel subsidies.

You may be tempted to skip over this chapter, given the title. It is about boring, bureaucratic regulatory details—but it is vitally important. The lawyers and politicians need jobs, too, so let’s get them involved in fixing climate change.

It is not obvious, but one front line in the fight to fix our climate lies with the hundreds of little regulatory barriers preventing the future we need. It would be awfully satisfying if marching in the streets and buying electric vehicles were all we had to do to stop climate change in its tracks. But winning the fight for our future isn’t just about marching on City Hall. It’s about walking in to talk to your representatives or, better yet, getting yourself elected so that, all across the country, we can make local building regulations, state utility regulations, and federal financing regulations align to support a carbon-free future.

I have always believed that rules and regulations should have expiration dates. Most laws shouldn’t last longer than 20 years, because given enough time, humans will figure out how to corrupt or work around any set of rules and regulations. Nowhere is this truer than in the burning of fossil fuels. I’d like to emphasize here that cleaning up our rules and regulations isn’t just about new legislation; it’s also, critically, about striking down old laws that are broken.

The old way of doing things is embedded in legislation and dinosaur thinking across the country, such as building and electric codes that aren’t friendly to solar, home, and vehicle electrification. Similarly, we have backward-looking utility regulations, road rules, gasoline taxes, homeowner-association charters, and tax incentives that all pervert the energy market and prevent us from doing what we need to do. The United States will solve climate change if we don’t let the bureaucratic crud and mental laziness of a century of writing regulations for a fossil fuel–based economy get in the way of a green decarbonized future for our children.

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