Drilling Deep: The Way Things Are Is Not the Way They Have to Be, with Natasha Hakimi Zapata

More than a decade ago—when wind and solar power were far more expensive than they are today—the nation of Uruguay, long plagued by droughts and energy shortages, transitioned its entire economy such that some 98 percent of its electricity now comes from renewable sources. And they did it in just two years. And they used the savings to slash the country’s poverty rate from 40 percent into the single digits.

Uruguay’s conventional-wisdom-busting transformation is one of nine inspiring case studies in the journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America from Around the Globe. In August, Drilled spoke with Hakimi Zapata about what lessons climate advocates and policymakers around the world can learn from Uruguay’s remarkable transition, why the left should not shy away from articulating the economic case for clean energy, and how many of the progressive policies profiled in the book seem to emerge from moments of crisis.
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