It seems Paul Hawken got tired of waiting.
Hawken is a legend in environmental circles. Since the early 1980s, he has been starting green businesses, writing books on ecological commerce (President Bill Clinton called Hawken’s Natural Capitalism one of the five most important books in the world), consulting with businesses and governments, speaking to civic groups, and collecting honorary doctorates (six so far).
A few years ago, he set out to pull together the careful coverage of solutions that had so long been lacking. With the help of a little funding, he and a team of several dozen research fellows set out to “map, measure, and model” the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change, using only peer-reviewed research.
The result, released last month, is called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.
http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
David Roberts
For the record, explain the term “drawdown.”
Paul Hawken
Drawdown is the point in time when greenhouse gas concentrations peak in the atmosphere and begin to go down on a year-to-year basis.
[Drawdown’s “plausible” scenario does not reach drawdown. Its second, “drawdown” scenario does. Its third, “optimum” scenario, which maxes out all available technologies, accelerates drawdown.]
David Roberts
So all these models we see in the popular press, the ones that hit, for example, 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050 — none of those actually reach drawdown?
Paul Hawken
None.
And not only that, they’re about energy — they’re all energy models. There’s an assumption that if you get 100 percent renewable [energy], you basically have a hall pass to the 22nd century. That’s simply not true. It’s a scientific howler. It’s extremely important that we [get to 100 percent renewables], but to put all of it on energy ...
[Drawdown has seven categories of solutions: energy, food, women and girls, buildings and cities, land use, transport, and materials. There’s also a “coming attractions” category of not-yet-commercialized technologies, but they are not included in the scenarios.]