This week, NPR is doing something new, dedicating an entire week to stories and conversations about the search for solutions to climate change.
Today we are bringing you a story about a giant environmental revolution in a tiny country.
This is planet money from NPR.
Last month, we traveled thousands of miles to Uruguay, this tiny country tucked in between Argentina and Brazil, to hear a pretty wild story from a a man named Ramon Mendez Galigne.
We met him at his house in Montevideo.
Hola.
Hola, Ramon.
Mucho Gusto.
Ramon says the story starts back in 2007.
His little country had a massive problem, one that had no obvious fix.
The economy of this country of 3.5 million people was growing, and there wasn't enough energy to power all of that growth.
So it was difficult for us to cope.
It was difficult to get electricity.
There was energy rationing for some time.
We're beginning to have blackouts.
People's electricity bills, they'd gone way up from just a few years earlier.
Ramon, at the time, he worked as a particle physicist.
I worked for many years trying to understand what happened after the big bang, what was the physics of the big bang, and how matter was organized in the universe and these kind of things.
When I hear the big bang theory, I just think of the tv show now.
Absolutely.