Energy Literacy: Saul Griffith Unplugged At ETech

The monumental imperative to save our planet requires launching ourselves over what seems an insurmountable hurdle involving the orchestration of global agreement and policy combined with individual actions that manifest themselves as a nebulous series of micro decisions. So good luck with all of that and call me when the polar bears and penguins are tanning themselves on Fire Island. Or maybe we should completely re-examine our own lives like Saul Griffith, MIT PhD, chief scientist at Makani Power and the most fascinating presenter (despite some 70 slides) at ETech last week.Griffith gave neither an impassioned imploring nor a detached and calculated scientific path; but instead, an engineering journey that probed deeply at what each of us must face. Or as he put it, a "personal story about each of us living and working in this shared planet, and the cumulative effects that each of our lives make."

An engineering approach to energy literacy begins with understanding that we must start with a goal, in this case for the earth's average temperature. His goal: a not-so-rosy, but hardly catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius. From there, you can essentially reverse engineer all the rest down to your own decisions. That temperature equates to 450 powers per million for carbon dioxide stabilization, or one-seventh of the power that humanity uses, according to Griffith, which means we need to make the other six-sevenths up with noncarbon emitting power.

Griffith doesn't deny that we have to do some things that are somewhat heroic, like install 100 square meters of solar cells per second for the next 25 years; one full size wind turbine every 5 minutes for the next 25 years; one complete nuclear power plant each week for 25 years.

But the personal side is surmountable. Griffith is someone who rides his bike to work, and considered himself an energy conserver, but in truth he found that he uses 25,000 watts, which is more than double the average person. Most of that is in business travel, some of it from car travel, and then in the things he eats.

He took the audience through each of these items and then figured out his fair share (if there's 15 terawatts for humanity and more than six billion people, he gets 2,255 watts). What he found was that he could easily cross off his list the things he didn't like to do (like business travel), and in fact increase the quality of his life by doing so.

The task is still daunting. The heroic efforts alone are scary. Getting agreement on targets will be like any other global initiative. But Griffith's message was perhaps less about putting forth a painfully impossible plan and more about showing how one could quite easily be crafted; and asserting that the time to start is now.