Drawdown The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

This is probably the most important book I’ll ever read. You should read it too.

Well, this is exactly what the doctor ordered. After reading The Uninhabitable Earth and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, I was really looking for a book with solution recommendations that are backed up by rigorous scientific and engineering analyses. Drawdown is that book. What is interesting, and in many cases startling, are the solutions we haven't heard of, including the solution that has the single largest impact on reducing greenhouse gases, which is.....wait for it.....replacing the kind of refrigerants we use in air conditioners. Not increased solar / wind, but moving away from HFC's that are the key ingredient in refrigeration and AC, because they are > 1000 times more powerful as greenhouse gases than is CO2. And who knew that reducing food waste is more impactful than massively ramping up solar farms, as is preserving existing tropical forests. Indeed if we lump together afforestation and preservation of tropical and temperate forests and preserving peatlands, the combined effect on reducing greenhouse gases is greater than any other single component in Drawdown's list of solutions. But on the other hand, if solar and wind are combined as one component, then it would be the largest impact. The great thing about this book is its organization: each component of the list is treated with a separate article, and there is a summary in the appendix. I should say "summaries", because the good engineers and scientists who compiled the data have helpfully organized the summaries in multiple ways; if you just want to look at solutions, ranked, that's one list. If you want to look at solutions by group, such as Energy, or Land Use, or Food, they have those. If you would prefer to tinker the data yourself and do your own subtotals, they have a website. By the way, the title, Drawdown, is a reflection of the fact that reducing CO2 emissions is not enough; we have to actually begin to reduce the concentration of CO2 (and methane & HFC's, et al.) in the atmosphere. One thing that surprised me was how big an effect our diets have; if we all ate less red meat (as we should for our health anyway), the positive effect of that is greater than all the solar farms we are likely to build. And there are many other agriculture-related positive impacts that are available, such as no-till farming, moving away from chemical fertilizers to using cover crops and other related methods, managed grazing, developing perennial crops, and silvopasturing for cattle. Almost all of the recommended solutions are win-win or, as the authors call them, "no regrets" initiatives. A few, like nuclear power, are necessary evils, but those are a small minority. All of the solutions are evaluated with a 30 year timeline (2020-50), which is, if our current understanding of the situation is correct, literally all the time we have left to reverse our march toward an uninhabitable earth. But it is ominous that the "optimistic" case (of three possible "vigor of implementation" cases) is the only one that gets us to drawdown of CO2 by 2050. The others help a lot, but..... Which leads me to think we are going to need at least some geoengineering to avoid catastrophe and buy us time for all these great solutions to work. That could be orbiting shade, or direct air capture of CO2, or several other possible man-made solutions to a man-made problem, but I'm beginning to believe we will need them in addition to the 80 proposals in Drawdown. This is a great book for anyone, but particularly so for people who, like me, have a preference for rigorous analysis and solutions backed by science and numbers that add up. Now, if we could just elect some politicians who would take all this seriously, because it is in fact the most serious issue of the next 50 years. It needs the WW2-style effort that has been outlined in this book. Individual effort alone by willing volunteers won't save us; governments will have to be elected that will vigorously engage and scale that effort into a global commitment - that might save us.

I rated this book 4 stars but also put it on my dnf shelf. Perhaps it would have gotten a fifth star had I actually been able to finish it. The problem is that this should never have been made into an audiobook. The first part meticulously catalogues how the research team was assembled and how the research was conducted. Then it becomes more of a reference compendium of what various technologies, innovations and/or practices can contribute to get the planet to a state of drawdown — where we are no longer adding CO2 emissions into the atmosphere but reversing the trend and pulling carbon back out. For that is the ultimate way to save the planet: by reversing the damage, not just slowing it. Lots of interesting and even practical ideas in here. I strongly recommend a printed or e-book instead of the audio.

The best book on climate change that I've read so far. It's more a reference with summaries of various technologies and practices that could reduce the adverse effects of climate change. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about actual options to fight climate change.