Patricia (Tish) Robinson's Must Reads Picks

1. Electrify |Saul Griffith

McArthur Grant recipient Saul Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment, which can be summed up simply: electrify everything.

“Electrify everything” quite literally means electrify everything we do. Electrify our vehicles. Electrify our homes, including the kitchen, the laundry, and the garage. Electrify our small businesses and commercial buildings. Electrify our industrial processes. We then have to produce all of that electricity with zero emissions, which means solar, wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal, but also nuclear. This clean-energy shift would not only power the world, but also disempower autocrats, who use their country's natural gas and coal exports to threaten their trading partners as they wages war against their neighbors. In this book, Griffith explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Griffith’s plan doesn’t rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. Griffith's research is prodigious and his explanation of the challenges of transforming energy use are well reasoned with extensive evidence on energy use and alternatives that would decarbonize the economy.

 

2. The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict | Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard is the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a council of 300 European leaders including serving and former presidents, prime ministers, economics, and foreign ministers.

In this short but important book selected by the Financial Times as a Book of the Year, Leonard observes that we have created an interconnected world that has brought great benefits. But it has also led to a tribal backlash, with “populist leaders promoting national glory over global understanding”.

He concludes that “if the connections that are essential to our wellbeing are also being turned into deadly weapons, we need to find ways of making them less dangerous.”