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

by Paul Hawken

In atmospheric terms drawdown is that point in time at which greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline on a year-to-year basis.

Almost all of the solutions compiled and analyzed here lead to regenerative economic outcomes that create security, produce jobs, improve health, save money, facilitate mobility, eliminate hunger, prevent pollution, restore soil, clean rivers, and more.

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. We have endeavored in Drawdown to show that 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. The buildup of greenhouse gases we experience today occurred in the absence of human understanding; our ancestors were innocent of the damage they were doing. That can tempt us to believe that global warming is something that is happening to us—that we are victims of a fate that was determined by actions that precede us. 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. We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is the human agenda. —Paul Hawken

But what is a gigaton? To appreciate its magnitude, imagine 400,000 Olympic-sized pools. That is about a billion metric tons of water, or 1 gigaton. Now multiply that by 36, yielding 14,400,000 pools. Thirty-six billion tons is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in 2016.

you read the book, what will become apparent is how sensible and empowering these solutions are. Rather than a lengthy technical manual, impenetrable to all save experts who have spent their lives immersed in the science behind these technologies, Drawdown aims to be accessible to anyone who wants to know what we, collectively, can do and the role each one of us might play. —Chad Frischmann

We are, in writer Jeremy Leggett’s words, squarely in the middle of the greatest energy transition in history. The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question now is when the new era will be fully upon us. Economics make its arrival inevitable: Clean energy is less expensive.

ENERGY WIND TURBINES RANKING AND RESULTS BY 2050 (ONSHORE) #2 84.6 GIGATONS $1.23 TRILLION $7.4 TRILLION REDUCED CO2 NET COST NET SAVINGS RANKING AND RESULTS BY 2050 (OFFSHORE) #22 14.1 GIGATONS $572.4 BILLION $274.6 BILLION REDUCED CO2 NET COST NET SAVINGS

Wind never blows. Because of uneven heating of the earth’s surface and the planet’s rotation, it is drawn from areas of higher pressure to lower, undulating over and above the landscape like an incoming tide of air. Change is riding on that tide: Wind energy is at the crest of initiatives to address global warming in the coming three decades, second only to refrigeration in total impact.

Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity. And it will soon be much more. Ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Investment in offshore wind was $29.9 billion in 2016, 40 percent greater than the prior year.

Denmark now supplies more than 40 percent of its electricity needs with wind power, and in Uruguay, wind satisfies more than 15 percent of demand. In many locales, wind is either competitive with or less expensive than coal-generated electricity.

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. Turbines can harvest electricity while farmers harvest alfalfa and corn. What’s more, it takes one year or...

Wind energy has its challenges. The weather is not the same everywhere. The variable nature of wind means there are times when turbines are not turning. Where the intermittent production of wind (and solar) power can span a broader geography, however, it is easier to overcome fluctuations in supply and demand. Interconnected grids can shuttle power to where it is needed. Critics argue that turbines are noisy, aesthetically unpleasant, and at times deadly to bats and migrating birds. Newer designs address these concerns with slower turning blades and siting practi...

Another impediment to wind power is inequitable government subsidies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fossil fuel industry received more than $5.3 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies in 2015; that is $10 million a minute, or about 6.5 percent of global GDP. Indirect fossil fuel subsidies include health costs due to air pollution, environmental damage, congestion, and global warming—none of which are factors with wind turbines. In comparison, the U.S. wind-energy industry has received $12.3 billion in direct subsidies since 2000. Outsize subsidies make fossil fuel...

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-cyc...

Goldman Sachs research paper published in June 2016 stated simply, “wind provides the lowest cost source of new capacity.” The cost of both wind and solar includes production tax credits; however, Goldman Sachs believes that the continuing decline in wind turbine costs will make up for the phasing out of tax credits in 2023. Wind projects built in 2016 are coming in at 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. A Morgan Stanley analysis shows that new wind energy production in the Midwest is one-third of the cost of natural gas combined-cycle plants. 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.” Bloomberg predicts that wind energy will be the ...

Costs are going down because turbines are being built at higher elevations—meaning longer blades in locations that have more wind, a combination that has more than doubled the capacity of a given turbine to generate electricity. Onshore turbines can be made larger because assembly is far easier than on water. Turbines that generate 20 megawatts...

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.

Wind energy, like other sources of energy, is part of a system. Investment in energy storage, transmission infrastructure, and distributed generation is essential to its growth. Technologies and infrastructure to store excess power are developing quickly now. Power lines to connect remote wind farms to areas of high demand are being built. For the world, the decision is simple: Invest in the future or in the past.

IMPACT: An increase in onshore wind from 2.9 percent of world electricity use to 21.6 percent by 2050 could reduce emissions by 84.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide. For offshore wind, growing from .1 percent to 4 percent could avoid 14.1 gigatons of emissions. At a combined cost of $1.8 trillion, wind turbines can deliver net savings of $7.7 trillion over three decades of operation. These are conservative estimates, however. Costs are falling annually and new technological improvements are already being installed, increasing capacity to generate more electricity at the same or lower cost.

ENERGY MICROGRIDS RANKING AND RESULTS BY 2050 #78 AN ENABLING TECHNOLOGY—COST AND SAVINGS ARE EMBEDDED IN RENEWABLE ENERGY

Microgrids will play a critical role in the advancement of a flexible and efficient electric grid. The use of local supply to serve local demand reduces energy lost in transmission and distribution, increasing efficiency of delivery compared to a centralized grid. 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.

Microgrid installations in grid-connected regions offer several key advantages. Civilization is dependent on electricity; losing access due to outages or blackouts is a critical risk. In developed countries, economic losses from such events can be many billions of dollars per year. Associated social costs include increased crime, transportation failures, and food wastage, in addition to the environmental cost of diesel-fueled backup power. Studies indicate that as overall demand for electricity increases, owing in part to use of air conditioning and electric vehicles, existing power systems become more frail and blackouts more frequent. By virtue of being localized systems, microgrids are more resilient and can be more responsive to local demand. In the event of disruption, a microgrid can focus on critical loads that require uninterrupted service, such as hospitals, and shed noncritical loads until adequate supply is restored.

In low-income countries, the advantages are greater. Globally, 1.1 billion people do not have access to a grid or electricity. More than 95 percent of them live in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, a majority in rural areas where highly polluting kerosene lamps are still the main source of lighting and meals are cooked on rudimentary stoves. While the connection between electrification and human development has been clear, progress has remained slow due to the high cost of extending the grid to remote regions. In rural p...

IMPACT: We model the growth of microgrids in areas that currently do not have access to electricity, using renewable energy alternatives such as in-stream hydro, micro wind, rooftop solar, and biomass energy, paired with distributed energy storage. It is assumed that these systems replace what would otherwise be the extension of a dirty grid or the continued use of off-grid oil or diesel generators. Emissions impacts are accounted for in the individual solutions themselves, preventing double counting. For higher-income countries the benefits of microgrid systems fall under “Grid Flexibility.”

ENERGY GEOTHERMAL RANKING AND RESULTS BY 2050 #18 16.6 GIGATONS -$155.5 BILLION $1.02 TRILLION REDUCED CO2 NET COST NET SAVINGS

Ours is an active planet. A constant flow of heat moves up toward the earth’s crust, generating tectonic plate movement, earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain making. About a fifth of the earth’s internal heat is primordial, lingering from the planet’s formation 4.6 billion years ago. The balance is generated by ongoing radioactive decay of potassium, thorium, and uranium isotopes in the crust and mantle. 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. The geysers of Yellowstone National Park are iconic evidence of a geothermal hot pot simmering beneath us, which occasionally gushes en plein air. The hot springs scattered across Iceland’s fire-and-ice landscape are another.

Hot water and steam within hydrothermal reservoirs can be piped to the surface and drive turbines to produce electricity—a feat first accomplished in Larderello, Italy, on July 15, 1904, when five lightbulbs were lit by a mechanical device powered by geothermal steam, the invention of Prince Piero Ginori Conti.

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. Although prime geothermal conditions are found on less than 10 percent of the planet, new technologies dramatically expand production potential in areas where useful resources were previously unknown. Conventionally, locating hydrothermal pools is the first step; however, pinpointing subsurface resources has been a challenge and limitation for geothermal power. It is difficult to know where reservoirs are and expensive to drill wells to find out. But new exploration techniques are opening up larger territories.

Iceland’s Svartsengi (“Black Meadow”) geothermal power plant, located on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland, was the first geothermal plant designed to both create electricity and provide hot water for district heating. With six different plants, it generates 75 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 25,000 homes. Its “waste” hot water is piped to the Blue Lagoon Geothermal Spa, visited by 400,000 guests annually.

One of these new approaches is enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which typically targets deep underground cavities and creates hydrothermal pools where they do not currently exist. EGS uses engineering to make use of areas that contain ample heat but little or no water, adding it in rather than relying on nature’s supply. By injecting high-pressure water into the earth, EGS techniques fracture and break up hot rock, making it more permeable and accessible. Once the rock is porous, water can be pumped in via one borehole, heated underground, then returned to the surface via another. After using it for electricity production, injection wells pump spent water back down into the reservoir. Or, in the case of Iceland’s Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, the Svartsengi power plant’s wastewater becomes bathwater for residents and tourists alike. With recirculation, the cycle repeats.

These innovations could dramatically increase the geographic reach of geothermal energy and, in certain locales, help address a critical challenge for renewables: providing baseload or readily dispatchable power. Wind power dwindles when winds are not blowing. Solar power takes the night off. With subterranean resources flowing 24-7, without interlude, geothermal production can take place at all hours and under almost any weather conditions. Geothermal is reliable, efficient, and the heat source itself is free.

In the process of pursuing its potential, geothermal’s negatives need to be managed. Whether naturally occurring or pumped in, water and steam can be laced with dissolved gases, including carbon dioxide, and toxic substances such as mercury, arsenic, and boric acid. 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 mic...

In twenty-four countries around the world, tackling these drawbacks is proving worthwhile because geothermal power can provide reliable, abundant, and affordable electricity, with low operational costs over its lifetime. 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. Though les...

There is opportunity to pursue geothermal with greater steam and in more places. 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 ...

The world’s geothermal vanguards point the way forward. They also underscore the importance of government involvement in growing generation. Even with a viable location in hand, geothermal plants can be expensive to bring online. The up-front costs of drilling are especially steep, particularly in less certain, more complex environments. That is why public investment, national targets for its production, and agreements that guarantee power will be purchased from companies that develop it have a crucial role to play in expansion. These measures all help to rein in the level of risk for investing. While hot new technologies such as enhanced geothermal systems advance, continued development of tra...

IMPACT: Our calculations assume geothermal grows from .66 percent of global electricity generation to 4.9 percent by 2050. That growth could reduce emissions by 16.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide and save $1 trillion in energy costs over thirty years and $2.1 trillion over the lifetime of the infrastructure. By providing baseload electricity, geothermal also supports expansion of variable renewables.

ENERGY SOLAR FARMS RANKING AND RESULTS BY 2050 #8 36.9 GIGATONS -$80.6 BILLION $5.02 TRILLION REDUCED CO2 NET COST NET SAVINGS

Any scenario for reversing global warming includes a massive ramp-up of solar power by mid-century. It simply makes sense; the sun shines every day, providing a virtually unlimited, clean, and free fuel at a price that never changes. Small, distributed clusters of rooftop panels are the most conspicuous evidence of the renewables revolution powered by solar photovoltaics (PV). The other, less obvious iteration of the PV phenomenon is large-scale arrays of hundreds, thousands, or in some cases millions of panels that achieve generating capacity in the tens or hundreds of megawatts. These solar farms operate at a utility scale, more like conventional power plants in the amount of electricity they produce, but dramatically different in their emissions.

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. Beyond the ecosystem damage those pollutants do, they are major contributors to outdoor air pollution, responsible for 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012.

The first solar PV farms went up in the early 1980s. Now, these utility-scale installations account for 65 percent of additions to solar PV capacity around the world. They can be found in deserts, on military bases, atop closed landfills, and even 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. Whatever the site, farm is an appropriate term for these expansive solar arrays because photovoltaics are literally a means of energy harvesting. The silicon panels that make up a solar farm harvest the photons streaming to earth from the sun. Inside a panel’s hermetically sealed environment, photons energize electrons and create electrical current—from light to voltage, precisely as the name suggests. Beyond particles, no moving parts are required.

Silicon PV technology was discovered by accident in the 1950s, alongside the invention of the silicon transistor that is present in almost every electronic device used today. That work happened under the auspices of the United States’ Bell Labs, accelerated by a search for sources of distributed power that could work in hot, humid, remote locations, where batteries might fail and the grid would not reach. Silicon, the Bell scientists found, was a major improvement over the selenium that had been standard for experimental solar panels since the late 1800s. It achieved more than a tenfold rise in efficiency of converting light to electricity. In the 1954 debut of the Bell “solar battery,” a tiny panel of silicon cells powered a twenty-one-inch Ferris wheel and then a radio transmitter. Small as they were, the demos duly impressed the press. The New York Times proclaimed it might mark “the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.”

Compared to rooftop solar, solar farms enjoy lower installation costs per watt, and their efficacy in translating sunlight into electricity (known as efficiency rating) is higher. When their panels rotate to make the most of the sun’s rays, generation can improve by 40 percent or more. At the same time, no matter where solar panels are placed, they are subject to the diurnal and variable nature of solar radiation and its misalignment with electricity use, peaking midday while demand peaks a few hours later. That is why as solar generation continues to grow, so should complementary renewables that are constant, such as geothermal, and that have rhythms different from the sun, such as wind, which tends to pick up at night. Energy storage and more flexible, intelligent grids that can manage the variability of production from PV farms will also be integral to solar’s success.

The International Renewable Energy Agency already credits 220 million to 330 million tons of annual carbon dioxide savings to solar photovoltaics, and they are less than 2 percent of the global electricity mix at present. Could solar meet 20 percent of global energy needs by 2027, as some University of Oxford researchers calculate? Thanks to complementary government interventions and market progress, there are many promising signs: costs reaching “grid parity” with fossil fuel generation and dropping, the typical solar panel factory churning out hundreds of megawatts of solar capacity each year, and panels lasting easily for twenty-five years, if not decades more. In 2015, solar PV met almost 8 percent of electricity demand in Italy and more than 6 percent in Germany and Greece, leaders in the solar revolution. PV has had a long history of surpassing expectations and taking unexpected leaps forward. Hand in hand with distributed solar and supported by the right enabling technologies, the “new era” cited by the New York Times in 1954 is becoming reality. •

IMPACT: Currently .4 percent of global electricity generation, utility-scale solar PV grows to 10 percent in our analysis. We assume an implementation cost of $1,445 per kilowatt and a learning rate of 19.2 percent, resulting in implementation savings of $81 billion when compared to fossil fuel plants. That increase could avoid 36.9 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions, while sa...

ENERGY ROOFTOP SOLAR RANKING AND RESULTS BY 2050 #10 24.6 GIGATONS $453.1 BILLION $3.46 TRILLION REDUCED CO2 NET COST NET SAVINGS

An Uros mother and her two daughters live on one of the 42 floating islands made of totora reeds on Lake Titicaca. Their delight upon receiving their first solar panel is infectious. Installed at an elevation of 12,507 feet, the panel will replace kerosene and provide electricity to her family for the first time. As high tech as solar may be, it is a perfect cultural match: The Uru People know themselves as Lupihaques, Sons of the Sun.

Roof modules are spreading around the world because of their affordability. Solar PV has benefited from a virtuous cycle of falling costs, driven by incentives to accelerate its development and implementation, economies of scale in manufacturing, advances in panel technology, and innovative approaches for end-user financing—such as the third-party ownership arrangements that have helped mainstream solar in the United States. As demand has grown and production has risen to meet it, prices have dropped; as prices have dropped, demand has grown further. A PV manufacturing boom in China has helped unleash a torrent of inexpensive panels around the world. But hard costs are only one side of the expense equation. The soft costs of financing, acquisition, permitting, and installation can be half the cost of a rooftop system and have not seen the same dip as panels themselves. That is part of the reason rooftop solar is more expensive than its utility-scale kin. Nonetheless, small-scale PV already generates electricity more cheaply than it can be brought from the grid in some parts of the United States, in many small island states, and in countries including Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The advantages of rooftop solar extend far beyond price. 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. ...

Numerous studies show that the financial benefit of rooftop PV runs both ways. By having it as part of an energy-generation portfolio, utilities can avoid the capital costs of additional coal or gas plants, for which their customers would otherwise have to pay, and...

Added PV supply at times of highest electricity demand can also curb the use of expensive and polluting peak generators. Some utilities reject this proposition and posit contradictory claims of rooftop PV being a “free rider,” as they aim to block the rise of distributed solar and its impact on their revenue and profitability. Others accept its inevitability and are trying to shift their business models accordingly. For all involved, the need for a grid “co...