Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

I’ve been telling friends about this breakthrough new book, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken in close collaboration with hundreds of consulting climate scientists, mathematicians and pioneering experts from a broad range of fields. Seldom are heard such encouraging words about climate change reversal these days. In early July while on a windy walk I started to "hear" a song about Drawdown. First a single phrase came to mind, then a melody. I don't believe an audio recording would pass muster as an Amazon review but I'm posting the below lyrics to the completed song, which is my attempt to distill the book's contents in a way that will interest others in picking it up and reading it. This book is a labor of love for the Earth. It's greatly encouraging me and many other people: DRAWDOWN We’ve created a vast vicious circle of CO2 pollution warming oceans, land and air. We’ve got to break the cycle, get some corporate divorces, and give our Mother Earth a lot more tender loving care. Now we’re trying to birth a more auspicious circle, reversing global warming is on many awesome minds. As we find new ways of living more lightly on Gaia, we will leave our sad old fossilized fuel blues behind. To cool the biosphere we can draw down CO2, adding carbon to the soil produces much more food. No need to feel helpless or listless we can cool it, there’s a growing list of grassroots ways we’re already doin’ it! A book titled Drawdown tells 100 things now being done to lessen carbon levels, here are just a few: there’s managed grazing, biochar, regenerative agriculture, clean inexpensive cookstoves and silvopastures too. Developments in geothermal, wind and solar, microgrids, wave and tidal systems to power our homes and towns; in-stream hydro, biomass from methane gas digesters…Old King Coal will be a bygone as new sources abound. There’s 100 ways in Drawdown to undo global warming, 80 absolutely proven and presently in use. Many experts did the math, estimating costs and savings and the gigatons of CO2 that each way will reduce. Top ranked include less food waste and managing refrigerants, as well as plant-rich diets, family planning you will view, temperate and tropical forest preservation, and better education for girls and women too. Yes we’re drawing a virtuous circle, reversing global warming in a grassroots turnaround. Mothered by necessity and human ingenuity, this book evokes a surge of hope, empowering drawdown. ____________ I highly recommend Drawdown. If you're not quite ready to purchase it, you might like to learn more at drawdown.org or by googling Paul Hawken’s excellent 4.21.17 talk at the Seattle Town Hall, posted on youtube by talkingsticktv on 4.25.17. Feel free to contact me if you'd like me to send you the audiofile of the song in mp3 form. Geoff Oelsner, Fayetteville, Arkansas

It doesn’t matter where you fall in the climate change debate — or if you believe humans are fully to blame -- or if you wonder if we have “enough” time for a course correction. The invitation in this bold book is to take a smart tough look at feasible solutions. Paul Hawken’s well-researched Project Drawdown report shows the potential to apply science-based solutions. It’s filled with strategies and concepts that are proven and underway and big and small solutions -- technologies. Microgrids. Biomass. Farmland Restoration. Regenerative Agriculture. More productive Land Use. Smart Transit. High Speed Rail. Plus plenty actions you can immediately adopt in your daily life: plant rich diets, reduced food waste, composting, tree intercropping, even family planning, and educating girls globally. While the Trump administration tries to yank us backward by pulling out of the voluntary Paris Agreement, making drastic cuts in the EPA budget, and obscuring the science, there is instant rejection to those short sighted policies. Individuals, cities, states, and responsible corporations were galvanized to step up fill the leadership void with positive actions. We’ve already learned that it makes economic sense with job growth in the “green” economy expanding rapidly. When Trump tried to distract us with this clever speech line saying “Pittsburgh is not Paris” he got an answer within hours -- the mayors of those two cities got on the phone together and said: “Though separated by an ocean and a language, we share a desire to do what is best for our citizens and our planet. That means putting aside parochial politics…” We don’t have time for clever speech lines. We don’t have time for partisan politics. None of us will survive without clean air and water. Some duck and say “their” region might be safe. Really? I’m in Ohio, but I have a son in Houston and a daughter in Florida. Ask your neighbors where their friends live. It’s a time of Hurricanes. Harvey. Irma. Jose. Katia. A time of wildfires raging in the western US. Of earthquakes off the coast of Mexico. What are we waiting for? We don’t have time for fear mongering, or to argue if we are past the tipping point. Too much emphasis on problems can be overwhelming and cause people to shut down. But we do have time to roll up our sleeves and pitch in. And I do mean “we” instead of “you” or “I” or “them.” Instead of Game Over, it’s Game On! Is Drawdown too buoyant? Are the math carbon savings estimates too optimistic? Are the solutions enough to reverse global warming? So what if we clean our air, water, soil and it turns out that climate change is not fully man made? Are we still not further ahead? Drawdown invites us to go beyond our fears for the future. Drawdown solutions are not sci fi fantasies of flying off to colonize Mars. No, the Drawdown team of over 200 researchers from 22 nations has given us a list what we can do right now both as individuals, and by working together. Share this book of solutions with your neighbors. And we are ALL neighbors on this unique planet of ours.

This book is a great addition to many public libraries, and for individuals and families engaged in climate activism. Both a technical and artistic accomplishment with one hundred proven ideas for stabilizing carbon dioxide, there should be a wave of parliamentarians who start applying the methods, such as, tropical forest conservation, solar thermal energy, solar photovoltaic, permaculture or perennial crops, geothermal, and electric cars. Each one of these and dozens more are described with three page detailed summaries, charts, and top quality color photos. Coordinating the strategies, like all climate campaigners know, is very difficult. A gasoline tax of twenty five cents per gallon would support electric cars, trains, buses, and local agriculture, with the carbon intensive option of distant agriculture becoming more expensive. On the other hand, any new tax on the middle class and working class means it is usually, but not necessarily, more challenging for people to improve homes with insulation, rooftop solar, and for the same people to eat more plant rich diets. Finally, the is a challenge with rogue nations. If only half or three quarters of the large nations are proactive climate, and nations like India, South Africa, Mexico, and Indonesia are slow with climate progress then short term benefits to the climate will be thwarted. Carbon drawdown is still important since the total amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere is what drives global warming, however, the short-term gains we should be seeing from projects like rooftop solar and forest conservation in temperate regions are frequently going to be outweighed by excessive coal use in the Global South and the destruction of the tropical rainforests. Many of the carbon drawdown strategies can buy time for large-scale energy transitions. Just how much time we are buying is uncertain. Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) are an important strategy. Desert areas may have EGS over hundreds and thousands of square miles, in the next five years, if nuclear explosives are used by the US and other leading governments (tactical nuclear weapons used a half mile to one mile underground). The technological proposals in the 1960s for "nuclear plowshares" which were focused on canal construction and mining, can be applied to geothermal energy. The 2030 goal of 50% carbon dioxide reductions set by the IPCC is therefore more feasible than generally understood. Geothermal sources in the lower part of Earth's crust and upper mantle can be accessed far better than with ordinary geothermal wells.

Drawdown is long overdue. As with all of Hawken's writings it's well conceived, carefully researched and beautifully written. Thank goodness for this effort. Yet.... I looked in vain for the evidence that the remedies discussed will materially change the trajectory of projected temperature increases. How much below 2 C will we stabilize at with full implementation of these 100 remedies? According to the book even the most aggressive scenario they model only reduces CO2 by less than one gigaton (out of about 40 gigatons we spew each year) and that isn't until 2045. That means that we're still doomed. I'm also puzzled that the book is called "The most comprehensive plan every proposed to reverse global warming". It's not a plan. It is a painstakingly researched compendium of currently used and and projected remedies. As such it's an essential contribution to our collective knowledge about climate change action. A plan however would have a set of goals, objectives, strategies, indicators and more. Perhaps Paul or others are now working to transform this solid beginning into a real plan. As a long time planner I'd be happy to help. There is also little discussion about the single most important variable affecting whether we retain a livable planet - and that is time - or lack of it. Most all comprehensive analyses conclude that we're essentially out of time to avoid the most existentially dangerous consequences of climate chaos. It's wildly optimistic, and unsupported by the evidence, to suggest, as Drawdown does, that we can reverse climate change even if most of these remedies are not fully implemented until 2050. Unless we almost fully decarbonize and drawdown in a decade or two, we're doomed to 5 -10 degrees F of warming by the end of the century. That level of warming will destabilize our politics, our economy, our food production, our social cohesion and our infrastructure to such an extreme degree that the organized productive work necessary to implement these remedies will be next to impossible to sustain. And even were we by some near miracle to stabilize at the 2 C target we'll have a barely habitable planet, despite the conventional climate wisdom. There's little that is scientific about the 2 C target. It's a convenient political decision that puts the need for urgent action far into the future. We can see the severe consequences on our ice caps, our coral reefs and our weather with only 1 C warming today. There's also the 'moral hazard' risk of the optimistic Drawdown message. We already have too much climate complacency. Yet reading Drawdown suggests that the market and human creativity is enough - or almost enough - to reverse climate change without mass mobilization and radical changes in how we invest, regulate, consume and organize our daily lives. I write this critique with hesitancy given the enormous trust I have in Paul's good intentions and the admirable efforts of his 200 person working group. But we need to do so much more and much faster than what Drawdown describes. So I hope Paul will integrate that perspective into his continuing efforts at showing us the best path forward.

I can't bear to read or hear about global warming because they are so depressing and I feel so helpless. This book focuses on solutions instead. It is both educational and inspiring! I liked this book so much, I bought 60 copies and gave them to everyone I knew or met who said they were interested in solutions to global warming. There is a quiz you can take online (do a search for Drawdown quiz) that helps you to get the big picture of what is covered in this book. Different solutions are ranked and their impacts quantified in terms of cost, benefit, and CO2 reductions and solutions are grouped into topic areas. Great information! I have friends who leave this book on their coffee table and read a few pages at a time; others who can't put it down. There is so much information here that it belongs in the reference section in a library. Recently a free online book became available at drawdown.org that covers much of the same ground. Check it out and check out the drawdown.org webpage, but buy this one if you can digest information better on a paper page or want to have it on hand to refer to.

So far so good. I never write reviews (this is the first Amazon review I ever ever written). If you buy this book, and I think you should, then please buy the hard copy of it and not the ebook. This is a beautiful, wonderful book (even though a "paperback"). It has very nice photos, it is oversized, and it's layout is very nice. It is a thoughtful, futuristic-focused book. Topics are laid out nicely, and it is well organized. Most important, it is not "preachy", but informative. I am struck by the notion that trends point to the FACT that warming is occurring on a global scale, and this FACT will effect the life-style of humans on the planet. Even if the warming is NOT caused by human actions (unlikely to impossible), that does not mean that we shouldn't bring to bear our resources and our expertise to slow it down/stop it/mitigate it. That is the tone of this book. And while it is probably NOT really "the most comprehensive PLAN ever proposed to reverse global warmimg", it IS a great overview of where we are, how we got here, and what kinds of things we ARE doing and we CAN do to nudge the living systems on which we are dependent in a positive manner.

This book stands as an introduction to a grand idea - that global warming can be reversed and here are 100 solutions, mathematically modelled together, showing how this might be accomplished. The book serves as an introduction - there is and always will be far more information on the site itself, but the visuals that were chosen and the stories provided will give interested readers enough information to encourage them to delve deeper into areas that speak to them. This book is an excellent way to start a conversation in a way other than the traditional "global warming is terrible and you should turn the lights off and hope for the best!" that we have encountered. Should you want to get involved more in drawdown, reach out to the Pachamama Alliance (pachamama.org) who are working with the Drawdown folks to hold training and discussions where people can learn how to get engaged locally and personally in helping to drive the solutions that resonate with them.

Hopefully this review will get lost among thousands of others, as everyone needs this book. But with only 9 reviews so far, I want to make sure that people considering getting this book know that they need to. I am not a scientist, nor did I know about this book before seeing it at a bookstore. It seems that most people are either in panic or in denial about global warming. This book shows that while global warming is here, we can fix it. Government officials slap hands when they come up with agreements that limit carbon dioxide emissions to old levels. This book points out that isn't enough; we need to fix the damage that we have done. But rather than pontificate about how bad global warming is and the dire problems that could result, it has put together what is essentially a blueprint for society to take care of the problem. Pretty nifty. Although it wasn't designed to provide a list of actions individuals can take (it is more an introduction to what the known solutions are, many of which would require lots of money -- and therefore governments or large corporations -- to implement), this is a great source of inspiration, and does provide quite a few ideas that individuals can take advantage of to help make a difference.

画期的名著 ポールホーケンの独特の語り口は、時々高尚かつ文学的で、やや科学的説得力という面では弱く感じる向きもあるかも

The authors due not gloss over the potential looming disaster that climate change represents.They do present a granular analysis of the muliple causes of climate change and potential solutions and mitigations. It is informative, empowering and ultimately hopeful. I learned loads and was particularly struck by the many win/win solutions that can reduce emissions, improve biodiversity, improve the lives of poor communities and/or save money over all. Potentially a book to inform the diference any one can make through life style changes, giving money and campaigning. Also a very good book for young adults or students thinking about career and other life choices.

Es un libro con gran contenido, con conceptos bastante bien definidos, temas complejos simplificado para una fácil entrada. Recomendado

Il miglior libro completo di tutte le soluzioni al cambiamento climatico e non solo! Per me, ingegnere ambientale, un vero manuale completo per la mia professione ..a 360°!!

The book a wide range of topics, but if you are deep into one topic there is not much for you here. It gives you an impression of what else is important, which makes the book worth its money. You get a wider perspective of the catastrophe