Deb Chachra, one of the smartest people I have ever had the pleasure to meet, has a new book out. You should read it!
It’s not directly related to the subject of this blog but, hey, it’s my blog, I can write about whatever I want. Besides, it’s Thanksgiving, and what better thing to be thankful for than functioning water, power, sewage, roads, transit and communication systems? (To the extent that those things function in the US – looking at you, public transit systems.) An alternate title for the book could be “What Infrastructure Means”. Another could be “move slow and fix things.” You can get a taste of it in this Guardian article that Deb wrote about Electric Mountain.
Deb has plenty of bad news to deliver about how poorly our infrastructure is equipped to handle climate change, but her ultimate message is remarkably optimistic.
The main reason that Deb is so optimistic is that the planet is inundated with more solar energy than we could ever possibly need, and if we could capture and store it at scale, there would be no need to collapse all the ecosystems or face mass starvation or go back to the Middle Ages or anything like that.
The technological problems for widespread adoption of sustainable energy are mainly solved, so now it’s a matter of social and political organization. Deb recognizes the scale of that challenge, and is clear about what it is going to take. She does not trust the invisible hand of the market to take care of things for us, because it creates bad incentives.
I met Deb via Twitter, and then face to face when she organized a meetup of her NYC-based Twitter friends. (This is the kind of thing she does.) Since then, I have been following her on social media and via her newsletter. She writes like I aspire to write: clearly, warmly, urgently. I hope this book is the first of many.