Foreword
"We know we can't avoid the cataclysmic impacts of global warming by only focusing on achieving net zero carbon emissions; we must also rapidly re-sequester carbon."
"Most importantly, today's solutions are social. Educating girls and widening access to family planning increases climate resiliency while empowering half the world's population. Reducing food waste enables us to feed more of the world while decreasing energy and water waste. Widespread adoption of recycling reduces our need for new raw materials and the energy to mine them."
I still need to find out what what exactly is the link between climate resiliency and educating girls/increasing access to family planning. I know they decrease poverty (don't know how exactly, have a rough guess). I know both are independently good but don't know how exactly they improve climate resiliency besides decreasing poverty.
"Drawdown offers the world twenty-first century solutions for a twenty-first century problem - using systems thinking and detailed analytics to tackle the biggest environmental challenge of our time."
Origins
"In atmospheric terms, drawdown is that point in time at which greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline on a year-to-year basis."
"I decided that the goal of the project would be to identify, measure, and model one hundred substantive solutions to determine how much we could accomplish within three decades towards that end."
"The subtitle of this book - the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming - may sound a bit brash. We have chosen this description because no detailed plan to reverse global warming has been proposed. There have been agreements and proposals on how to slow, cap, and arrest emissions, and there are international commitments to prevent global temperature increases from exceeding two degrees centigrade over preindustrial levels. One hundred and ninety-five nations have made extraordinary progress in coming together to acknowledge that we have a momentous civilizational crisis on our earthly doorstep and have created national plans of action. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has completed the most significant scientific study in the history of humankind, and continues to refine the science, expand the research, and extend our grasp of one of the most complex systems imaginable. However, there is, as yet, no road map that goes beyond slowing or stopping emissions."
"the Drawdown fellows comprise seventy individuals from twenty-two countries. Forty percent are women, nearly half have PhDs, and others have at least one advanced degree. They have extensive academic and professional experience at some of the world’s most respected institutions."
"we gathered comprehensive lists of climate solutions and winnowed them down to those that had the greatest potential to reduce emissions or sequester carbon from the atmosphere. We then compiled literature reviews and devised detailed climate and financial models for each of the solutions. The analyses informing this book were then put through a three-stage process including review by outside experts who evaluated the inputs, sources, and calculations. We brought together a 120-person Advisory Board, a prominent and diverse community of geologists, engineers, agronomists, politicians, writers, climatologists, biologists, botanists, economists, financial analysts, architects, and activists who reviewed and validated the text."
"There are a small handful of entries in this book whose spillover effects are clearly detrimental to human and planetary health, and we try to make that clear in our descriptions. The overwhelming majority, however, are no-regrets solutions, initiatives we would want to achieve regardless of their ultimate impact on emissions and climate, as they are practices that benefit society and the environment in multiple ways.
"We remain a learning organization. Our role is to collect information, organize it in ways that are helpful, distribute it to any and all, and provide the means to add, amend, correct, and extend the information"
The buildup of greenhouse gases we experience today occurred in the absence of human understanding: our ancestors were innocent of the damage they were doing
Didn't most of the buildup take place in the last three decades though, when we already knew about the Keeling curve (aka the hockey stick graph)?
"If we change the preposition, and consider that global warming is happening for us - an atmospheric transformation that inspires us to change and reimagine everything we make and do - we begin to live in a different world. We take 100 percent responsility and stop blaming others. We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius."
It's true, the climate crisis has provided the best opportunity to shift the overton window to the left and test new radical theories for affecting social change and restructuring society.
Language
Confucius wrote that calling things by their proper name is the beginning of wisdom. In the world of climate change, names can sometimes be the beginning of confusion. Climate science contains its own specialized vocabulary, acronyms, lingo, and jargon. It is a language derived by scientists and policymakers that is succinct, specific, and useful. However, as a means of communication to the broader public, it can create separation and distance.
I remember my economics professor asking for a definiton of Gresham's law and how I rattled off the answer mechanically. He looked at me - none too pleased, though the answer was correct - and said, now explain it to your grandmother. That was much more difficult. The answer I gave to the professor would have made no sense to her. It was lingo. So it is with climate and global warming. Very few people actually understand climate science, yet the basic mechanism of global warming is pretty straightforward.
Our goal is to present climate science and solutions in language that is accessible and compelling to the broadest audience, from ninth graders to pipe fitters, from graduate students to farmers.
Climate is a function of biological activity on earth, and physics and chemistry in the sky. It is the prevalent weather conditions over time. Climate changes because it always has and will, and variations of climate produce everything from seasons to evolution. The goal is to come into alignment with the impact we are having on climate by addressing the human causes of global warming and bringing carbon back home.
Last, there is the term “global warming.” The history of the concept goes back to the nineteenth century when Eunice Foote (1856) and John Tyndall (1859) independently described how gases trap heat in the atmosphere and how changes in the concentration of gases would alter the climate. The term global warming was first used by geochemist Wallace Broecker in a 1975 Science article entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” Before that article, the term used was inadvertent climate modification.
Global warming refers to the surface temperature of the earth. Climate change refers to the many changes that will occur with increases in temperature and greenhouse gases.
Numbers
What you will see on the page
Each solution includes an introduction that draws on history, science, key examples, and the most current information available. Every description is supported by a detailed technical assessment available on our website for further exploration. Each entry also features a summary of output from the models, including a ranking of the solution by its emissions-reduction potential. We enumerate how many gigatons of greenhouse gases are avoided or removed from the atmosphere, as well as the total incremental cost to implement the solution, and the net cost or—in most cases—savings.
In the models, we rely on peer-reviewed science for inputs. In some areas, such as land use and farming, there is a plethora of anecdotal facts and figures, some of which we refer to but we do not use in our calculations.
Ranking of Solutions
There are several ways one can rank solutions: how cost-effective they are; how quickly they can be implemented; or how beneficial they are to society.
For our purposes, we rank solutions based on the total amount of greenhouse gases they can potentially avoid or remove from the atmosphere. The rankings are global.
The relative importance of one solution may differ depending on geography, economic conditions, or sector.
Gigatons of carbon dioxide reduced
Carbon dioxide may get the most press, but it is not the only greenhouse gas. Other heat-trapping gases include methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases, and water vapor.
Each solution in Drawdown reduces greenhouse gases by avoiding emissions and/or by sequestering carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. The degree to which a given solution has a bearing on greenhouse gases is translated into gigatons of carbon dioxide removed between 2020 and 2050.
Total net cost and operational savings
The total cost of each solution in this book is the amount needed to purchase, install, and operate it over thirty years.
We err on the side of being conservative. That means assuming costs associated with the solution that are on the high end, and then keeping them relatively constant from 2020 to 2050.
In the back of the book, we summarize the net cost and savings solution-by-solution for comparison. Net savings are based on the operating costs of solutions after implementation from 2020 to 2050. This calculation reveals the cost-effectiveness of the solutions presented. When considering the scale of benefits, the potential profits and savings, and the investments needed if conditions remain the same, the costs become negligible. The payback period for most solutions is relatively short in time.
Solutions
Energy
Wind Turbines
- The second most effective climate intervention according to this book, after managing refrigerant gases (HFCs).
- Leads to 84.6 gigaton reduction of CO2
- Has a net cost of $1.23 trillion, and net savings of $7.4 trillion by 2050.
Wind energy is at the crest of initiatives to address global warming in the coming three decades, second only to refrigerant management in total impact.
Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity.
Human beings harnessed the power of wind for millennia. The earliest recorded windmills were created around 500 to 900 AD in Persia. By the late 1800s, inventors around the world were successfully converting the kinetic energy of wind into electricity. Prototypical turbines popped up in Glasgow, Scotland, Ohio, and Denmark, and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago featured a variety of manufacturers and their designs. In the 1920s and '30s, farms across the midwestern United States were dotted with wind turbines as a dominant energy source. In 1931, Russia launched utility-scale wind production,
Basically, wind power is old, and was on track to be one of the major sources of energy till the mid 1900s.
Fossil fuels sidelined wind energy during the mid-twentieth century.
Denmark now supplies more than 40 percent of its electricity needs with wind power,
In many locales, wind is either competitive with or less expensive than coal-generated electricity.
Wind farms have small footprints, typically using no more than 1 percent of the land they sit on, so grazing, farming, recreation, or conservation can happen simultaneously with power generation ... What’s more, it takes one year or less to build a wind farm, quickly producing energy and a return on investment.
Critics argue that turbines are noisy, aesthetically unpleasant, and at times deadly to bats and migrating birds. Newer designs address these concerns with slower turning blades
Another impediment to wind power is inequitable government subsidies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fossil fuel industry received more than $5.3 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies in 2015; that is $10 million a minute, or about 6.5 percent of global GDP.
Another impediment to wind power is inequitable government subsidies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fossil fuel industry received more than $5.3 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies in 2015; that is $10 million a minute, or about 6.5 percent of global GDP.
Ongoing cost reduction will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of installed electricity capacity, perhaps within a decade ... A Goldman Sachs research paper published in June 2016 stated simply, “wind provides the lowest cost source of new capacity.”
Bloomberg New Energy Finance has calculated that “the lifetime cost of wind and solar is less than the cost of building new fossil fuel plants.”
The ways and means for the United States to be fossil fuel and energy independent are here. What is often missing is political will and leadership. Critics in Congress disparage wind power because it is subsidized, implying that the federal government is pouring money down a hole. Coal is a freeloader when it comes to the costs borne by society for environmental impacts
Wind power uses 98 to 99 percent less water than fossil fuel–generated electricity. Coal, gas, and nuclear power require massive amounts of water for cooling, withdrawing more water than agriculture
IMPACT: An increase in onshore wind from 2.9 percent of world electricity use to 21.6 percent by 2050 could reduce emissions by 84.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide.