Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are thrilled to present the virtual launch event for Saul Griffith and his book Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future. He'll be in conversation with Laura Fraser (An Italian Affair).

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order Electrify here and we'll ship it directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop).

We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact [email protected].

About the book

An optimistic—but realistic and feasible—action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything.

Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith's plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.

Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith's plan doesn't rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to 25 million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.

About the authors

Saul Griffith, inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer, is founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007.

Laura Fraser is a journalist and author of three books of nonfiction, including the NYT-bestselling memoir, An Italian Affair. As founder and editorial director of Shebooks, she published 75 short ebooks by women before selling the company to Shewrites Press. She lives around the corner from the Booksmith and launched all three of her books here. She's also interviewed several authors for the Booksmith. Lately, she has been collaborating with Saul Griffith and Rewiring America, the organization he founded. So while she is not objective about the material in Saul's new book, she is well-acquainted with it.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.