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

by Paul Hawken

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.

Unquestionably, distress signals are flashing throughout nature and society, from drought, sea level rise, and unrelenting increases in temperatures to expanded refugee crises, conflict, and dislocation. This is not the whole story.

many people are staunchly and unwaveringly on the case. Although carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use have a two-century head start on these solutions, we will take those odds.

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 responsibility and stop blaming others.

As much as possible, we refrain from acronyms and lesser-known climate terminology. We generally spell out carbon dioxide instead of abbreviating it. We write methane, not CH4.

If you are traveling down the wrong road, you are still on the wrong road if you slow down.

Wind energy is at the crest of initiatives to address global warming in the coming three decades, second only to refrigeration in total impact.

Altogether, the project will supply power for all 466,000 inhabitants of Liverpool.

This modern resurgence paved the way for where the wind industry is today with its proliferation of turbines, dropping costs, and heightened performance.

In the United States, the wind energy potential of just three states—Kansas, North Dakota, and Texas—would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to coast.

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.

Outsize subsidies make fossil fuels look less expensive, obscuring wind power’s cost competitiveness, and they give fossil fuels an incumbent advantage, making investment more attractive.

Ongoing cost reduction will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of installed electricity capacity, perhaps within a decade. Current costs are 2.9 cents per kilowatt-hour for wind, 3.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for natural gas combined-cycle plants, and 5.7 cents per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale solar.

Goldman Sachs research paper published in June 2016 stated simply, “wind provides the lowest c...

And finally, 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.”

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—22 trillion to 62 trillion gallons per year.

Water for many fossil fuel and nuclear plants is “free,” bestowed by the federal government or the states, but it is hardly free and instead represents another unacknowledged subsidy.

Bottlenecks in the grid caused 4,100 gigawatt-hours of wind electricity to be wasted in 2015—enough energy to power 1.2 million homes.

Concerns that wind would be unable to supply enough energy for Europe are being replaced by worries that grid integration and utility and distributed energy storage systems will not keep up with demand.

This setup made sense when power generation was concentrated. Today, it hinders society’s transition from dirty energy produced in a few places to clean energy produced everywhere.

When coal is burned to boil water to turn a turbine to generate electricity, two-thirds of the energy is dispersed as waste heat and in-line losses.

Where utilities are resistant, monopoly, not technology, is the biggest challenge for microgrids.

The heat energy generated is about 100 billion times more than current world energy consumption. Geothermal energy—literally “earth heat”—creates underground reservoirs of steamy hot water.

Geothermal energy is earth energy and depends on heat, an underground reservoir, and water or steam to carry that heat up to the earth’s surface.

Though its emissions per megawatt hour are just 5 to 10 percent of a coal plant’s, geothermal is not without greenhouse impact. In addition, depleting hydrothermal pools can cause soil subsidence, while hydrofracturing can produce microearthquakes.

In El Salvador and the Philippines, geothermal accounts for a quarter of national electric capacity. In volcanic Iceland, it is one-third. In Kenya, thanks to the activity beneath Africa’s Great Rift Valley, fully half of the country’s electricity generation is geothermal—and growing.

According to the Geothermal Energy Association, 39 countries could supply 100 percent of their electricity needs from geothermal energy, yet only 6 to 7 percent of the world’s potential geothermal power has been tapped.

Theoretical projections based on geologic surveys of Iceland and the United States indicate that undiscovered geothermal resources could supply 1 to 2 terawatts of power or 7 to 13 percent of current human consumption.

Any scenario for reversing global warming includes a massive ramp-up of solar power by mid-century.

When their entire life cycle is taken into account, solar farms curtail 94 percent of the carbon emissions that coal plants emit and completely eliminate emissions of sulfur and nitrous oxides, mercury, and particulates.

floating on reservoirs, where they perform the additional benefit of reducing evaporation.

If Ukrainian officials have their way, Chernobyl, the site of a mass nuclear meltdown in 1986, will house a 1-gigawatt solar farm, which would be one of the world’s largest.

Ironically, the first major purchaser of solar cells for use on earth was the oil industry, which needed a distributed energy source for its rigs and extraction operations.

Informed predictions about the cost and growth of solar PV indicate that it will soon become the least expensive energy in the world.

In many parts of the world, solar PV is now cost competitive with or less costly than conventional power generation.

While the production of PV panels, like any manufacturing process, involves emissions, they generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases or air pollution—with the infinite resource of sunlight as their sole input.

When placed on a grid-connected roof, they produce energy at the site of consumption, avoiding the inevitable losses of grid transmission. They can help utilities meet broader demand by feeding unused electricity into the grid, especially in summer, when solar is humming and electricity needs run high.

financially feasible for homeowners, offsetting

It means rooftop PV is accelerating access to affordable, clean electricity and thereby becoming a powerful tool for eliminating poverty.

Wave and tidal energy is currently the most expensive of all renewables, and with the price of wind and solar dropping rapidly, that gap will likely widen.

Unlike PV panels and wind turbines, CSP makes heat before it makes electricity, and the former is much easier and more efficient to store. Indeed, heat can be stored twenty to one hundred times more cheaply than electricity.

Photosynthesis is an energy conversion and storage process; solar energy is captured and stored as carbohydrates in biomass.

Rather than releasing fossil-fuel carbon that has been stored for eons far belowground, biomass energy generation trades in carbon that is already in circulation, cycling from atmosphere to plants and back again.

At present, biomass fuels 2 percent of global electricity production, more than any other renewable.

Greenhouse gases emitted to generate electricity are calculated to be ten to a hundred times higher for coal than for nuclear.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, advanced nuclear is the most expensive form of energy besides conventional gas turbines, which are comparatively inefficient. Onshore wind is a quarter of the cost of nuclear power.

James Hansen, the NASA scientist who put the United States on notice in his 1988 congressional testimony on climate change, takes another perspective. He authored an open letter with three other climate leaders stating, “Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot expand fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires. While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.” Their proposal would require building 115 reactors per year for thirty-five years.

There are new reactor designs that address some of the main criticisms and concerns about nuclear energy.