With a new year and new leadership in the White House, the crises that plagued 2020 — the pandemic, wildfires fueled by climate change and high unemployment — can be turned into opportunities. We now have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to solve our current economic crisis, address climate change and help unify the country: by electrifying everything.

If we do it right, with the proper financing, switching from fossil fuels to electricity (backed by renewable energy) would save everyone money. Today, the average California household spends about $4,000 on energy bills per year. With the right financing to switch to all-electric homes and cars, they’ll keep $2,548 per year in their pockets. Statewide, electrifying California households will generate over $34 billion in savings. At a time when we have the highest unemployment since the Great Depression, it would create over 30,000 new, good-paying jobs.

And we’ll be saving the planet in the process.

We can accomplish this transition to clean electricity using existing technologies, and without disrupting any of the comforts of our lifestyle. We can still enjoy zippy cars, the same-sized heated homes and push-button conveniences — only the electric technology of the future will be better.

How? To power our lives without fossil fuels, we’ll need to build capacity to generate three times the current amount of electricity— more than 1500 gigawatts. The scale of electrification will be more massive than any project America has seen in decades. We will need hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, six million zero-emission trucks, a million miles of transmission lines, hundreds of millions of electric vehicles, heat pumps and electric induction ranges, billions of solar cells and more than a trillion batteries. Across the country, that adds up to tens of millions of jobs to manufacture, build, install and manage all those things.

Those jobs will be ongoing, they’ll stay at home and they’ll have a multiplying effect on the economy. Clean energy technologies require more labor in manufacturing, installation and maintenance than fossil fuel technologies. It takes more people to install and keep a wind farm running than it does to drill a well and keep it pumping to produce the same amount of energy over time.

We’ll have clean energy jobs in every zip code because we’ll need to install solar panels on our homes, office roofs, parking lots and in our fields alongside wind turbines. Those jobs will create more local jobs: The woman installing wind farms will get a handsome paycheck that she’ll spread around her local economy, reviving restaurants, shops and other hard-hit businesses. People hit hard by the current crisis will have an opportunity for good, new jobs while helping to transition their communities to cleaner and safer sources of power.

While we have the technological solutions to electrify America renewably, we’ll also need new policies and financing in place. Transitioning to clean energy will require higher up-front costs, building new, more widely-distributed electrical infrastructure. Much of this infrastructure will be personal — the solar panels on your roof and the electric vehicles in your garage — since over 40% of our emissions come from what’s in our houses and garages. To successfully address climate change, every American’s next purchases of homes, cars, heaters and other household appliances must be electric. To accomplish that, we’ll have to make low-cost financing and credit supports available to Americans to afford the higher up-front costs of switching to clean energy.

Following the Great Depression, the job programs and financial innovations of the New Deal offered some Americans an opportunity to buy a house, appliances and new-found stability (though African-Americans were excluded from federal mortgages). Today, we have the opportunity to make similar “climate loans” more inclusive and equitable, helping everyone make the switch from fossil fuel-powered machines to electric ones.

With the proper financing, switching to clean energy will not cost the average American any upfront investment. Once we build our infrastructure, renewable electricity will be very cheap — the sun shines and the wind blows for free — saving the households money and providing predictable energy bills. This is an especially big win for low-income Americans, who are the hardest hit by fluctuations in fuel prices. When energy is cheap, everything is cheaper.

In addition to smart financing, we also need climate-friendly policies and regulatory reforms to update building codes to make it easier to electrify and install rooftop solar.

California is already leading the way. San Jose recently updated its building code. Oakland became the 40th community to commit to phasing out gas and over 50 other cities and counties across the state are considering policies to support all-electric new construction. To make the system run smoothly, we’ll need “grid neutrality” so that everyone can exchange energy freely and democratically — the way we exchange information over the internet. That would allow the battery in your electric vehicle to store the electricity generated on our roofs so as to power your neighbor’s electric stove.

We can do all of this now. All we need is the will and leadership to make it happen. Now, as during World War II and the Great Depression, we have a rare opportunity to rise from a crisis, defeat a mortal threat and rebuild America for a cleaner, more prosperous future. We have to shoot for the moon to save the Earth.