Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Well, it's a dangerous idea

all right. We are reaching an electricity and energy tipping point at which the future of the world's

climate and our future as a species that is not constantly racked by ever-intensifying and ever-more-frequent

natural disasters hangs in the balance, and that perhaps we're all arguing about the wrong things,

how we supply and generate electricity, whether we use nuclear, how much we use solar, how exactly

we should manage the increased demand that artificial intelligence is likely

to throw up. We may be looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. We may instead

want to look at the demand side, not the supply side, how we use the electricity, when it arrives

into our home, how we store the electricity, whether we use batteries in our homes,

whether we plug electric cars back into the grid, whether or not we have local substations that

are smart grids and smart homes that manage the supply of energy that's coming onto your street,

into your house, into your car, into your stove top.

Saul Griffith is one of the world's

leading experts on the energy revolution, on basically decarbonising everything and electrifying

everything. Saul has founded a dozen Silicon Valley technology companies in the energy space.

He's founded research and development labs. He's founded

non-partisan, non-profit organizations. He was instrumental in developing the Biden administration's

climate action plan. He has recently undergone the very, very stressful experience of having

Elon Musk's doge cuts come in horrendous ways for his research, not just on climate change, but also on

pandemic research, which he was involved in. And we begin in a somewhat subdued and

mournful way about the state of affairs at the moment, especially its consequences for American

scientific research. But do not be put off by that forlorn

...