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Project Drawdown

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Project Drawdown

Unread postby Graeme » Wed 22 Oct 2014, 17:03:44

Inside Paul Hawken’s audacious plan to 'drawdown' climate change

Today, at the Greenbuild conference in New Orleans, entrepreneur and author Paul Hawken will publicly unveil a project, more than a year in the works, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

You read that right: to reduce, not just stabilize, atmospheric CO2 and other gases, in order to reverse rising global temperatures.

Project Drawdown, as it is named, will produce a book in 2016, detailing the costs and benefits of scores of climate solutions, from light bulb technology to livestock techniques to literacy for teenage girls. For each, Hawken and his team will “do the numbers,” providing detailed, science-based data and econometric models showing how each plays out, based on current technology and how it will likely evolve over the project’s 30-year horizon.

“The book is not a plan,” Hawken explained to me recently. “It is not a proposal. It is a reflection back to the world what we are doing and know how to do right this second.”

A meaningful dent
The project grew out of Hawken’s frustration with actionable, scalable solutions that would make a meaningful dent in the atmosphere’s growing accumulation of greenhouse gases. The solutions that had been proffered over the years were all seemingly out of reach — ungodly amounts of solar and wind energy that would be required, for example, or the mass adoption of futuristic, unproven technologies.

“It made me feel like this is intractable, that it requires such Promethean work by such mammoth institutions, with policy changes that are more than structural,” he recalled. “It made me feel like it wasn’t possible to address climate change, rather than giving me hope.”

When the activist Bill McKibben wrote the seminal article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” in Rolling Stone in 2012, Hawken asked, “Why aren’t we doing the math on the solutions? Somebody should come up with a list and see what it requires so you get to drawdown.”

The idea of “drawdown” — actually reducing greenhouse gas concentrations so that global temperatures drop — hasn’t been part of the conversation, at least among the United Nations crowd, climate activists or cleantech companies. Most focused on the seemingly pragmatic goal of stabilizing greenhouse gases at some level, expressed in parts per million, or ppm, that would be tolerable — or at least not catastrophic, from economic, environmental and social perspectives.


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Re: Project Drawdown

Unread postby jedrider » Wed 22 Oct 2014, 18:45:33

Yes, a MILLION years of photosynthesis. Do we have time?
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Re: Project Drawdown

Unread postby Newfie » Wed 22 Oct 2014, 18:56:43

So, he hasn't done the math, but he knows the outcome will be favorable?

:-D
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Re: Project Drawdown

Unread postby Graeme » Wed 22 Oct 2014, 19:00:40

Yes, this is mentioned in the last few paragraphs of the article:

Despite the long road ahead, Hawken is already looking past the publication of what he dubs “Drawdown 1,” and on to its sequel. That, he promises, will look at the next generation of technologies, with all of their unrealized potential to solve climate change. “We don’t know the ending of this book, make that very clear, but with Drawdown 2, we’re saying, ‘Look what is coming. It is stunning.’”

It’s easy, in today’s divisive and toxic political environment, to view Project Drawdown as too good to be true, a quixotic quest for an unattainable goal.

But there’s something simple and sane about Project Drawdown’s collective ingredients: unabashed optimism tempered by sharp-pencil calculations, a bold goal undergirded by scientific pragmatism, immediacy coupled with a 30-year horizon, all leveraging the wisdom of a very smart crowd.

Not all of it will pan out — there are simply too many variables and uncertainties — but much of it will. And it just could move the needle.
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Re: Project Drawdown

Unread postby TemplarMyst » Fri 24 Oct 2014, 10:57:52

Well, what the heck. It could be interesting.

I've really been hoping something like this would come along at some point, so I'll be interested in what he and his team have to say. The closest I've heard so far (in my limited experience) has been from David MacKay. I'm sure there must be others, but when I ran across him I felt he at least has crunched the numbers and provides them for review.

For those not inclined to wade through a lot of documentation, he has a nice TED Talk that's worth a view, if one is so inclined.
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