In the proposed mechanism, the reaction starts with the formation of the quinuclidinium radical cation (Qu +• ) at the anode, followed by hydrogen abstraction of the C3-H bond (Scheme 4). In As expected, no reaction occurred in the absence of quinuclidine, while the absence of HFIP resulted in a significant decrease in yield. Surprisingly, however, when we subjected 2 to electrochemical oxidation under an argon atmosphere and rigorous exclusion of oxygen, this hardly effected the reaction! As a control, and to exclude the inadvertent presence of oxygen, we reproduced the C-H activation reaction reported by Baran et al. using the benchmark substrate sclareolide. As expected, this reaction clearly required oxygen, and the yield dropped dramatically to less than 5% upon exclusion of oxygen.