Paul Hawken’s DRAWDOWN holds 80 solutions of over 100 studied, which, if implemented, could actually reverse the horrific effects of global warming. The book and movement of the same name: DRAWDOWN — The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming – and also the most purchased environmental book of 2017 – is available now at bookstores, on Amazon and at drawdown.org. It’s a movement – and if you’re in any way a progressive or politically active and live in the Bay Area you’re likely to hear of DRAWDOWN meetings you can attend in your town or nextdoor. Find those or start one of your own by checking DRAWDOWN.org and put your name on the email list to stay current with the movement.
Though I attempted in an earlier blog to dissect this tough material, (and long ago tried this with Paul’s Ecology of Commerce) I’m excited to see Rob Sidon, a gifted interviewer and publisher of the free monthly mag, Common Ground, making this info more accessible this month.
Each page of DRAWDOWN represents about 100 pages of data from over 200 advisors on conditions and solutions for our planet-in-crisis. The references and cross references are astounding and valuable to anyone seeking real solutions to what appears to be killing the planet. While our hero, Bill McKibben, urged us to hold the line at CO2 concentrations of 350ppm of carbon, life goes on as usual, but our current ppm levels exceed 490 with no let up in sight! Hawken’s DRAWDOWN solutions show us who’s doing what to overcome this disaster in the making, aiming, for instance, on educating girls at least through high school, resulting in a birth rate drop from 5+ to 2+ per young woman as an educated woman can earn a living.
While Hawken says he’s “not hopeful,” he stipulated he’s “interested in fearlessness – there is no such thing as hope unless you have a fear…I think we have to stop using fear to motivate people about global warming. It turns people off and makes them numb,” he says.
Choosing to be fearless – a challenge when the news is so often rotten! What if our children WON’T have clean drinking water or shelter or food or we do experience a nuclear winter? What if melting ice caps mean floods and hurricanes? Already happening! Some young people are now giving up having a family altogether with awful future in mind.
The DRAWDOWN plan isn’t instant: it would take an estimated 30 years to accomplish. “Project Drawdown’s role is not to implement these solutions, but rather to point to how they already are being implemented by humanity around the globe and the potential of these solutions if they are scaled over the next thirty years.
Project Drawdown has partnerships in place with businesses, NGOs, activists, academics, and individuals, and will continue to cultivate these working relationships in the coming months and years. Most recently, we have been appointed by the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations, Patricia Scotland, to collaborate with the Commonwealth on future research. Secretary Scotland has committed the Commonwealth to integrating Drawdown into the economic and ecologic portfolios of the fifty-two countries that comprise the Commonwealth, representing a population that is just shy of one-third of humanity.” (from the site) According to Scotland, the Commonwealth is comprised of “2.4 billion of us” under the symbolic leadership of HM Queen Elizabeth of England.
“Yikes!” says Paul Hawken in the Common Ground interview, “We don’t really know where we are – this is terra nova. And there is a lag time between an increase of greenhouse gases and its impact on climate, weather, the hydrological cycle, ocean levels, heat and drought, and turbulence in terms of extreme weather and storms. …It is not okay. So the important thing about DRAWDOWN is that we named the goal – not to mitigate climate change, but to stop and go the other way – to reverse global warming.”
Pick up a copy of Common Ground in Petaluma at Copperfields, Aqus, in boxes on the street. Six other great articles, too!
Drawdown
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@ProjectDrawdown
Project Drawdown’s @PaulHawken spoke to @dnbornstein of @NYTimes on #Drawdown’s 100 #climatesolutions & the world’s efforts to #ReverseGlobalWarming: “an extraordinary diversity of solutions to global warming…are at hand, being implemented and scaling.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/opinion/a-smorgasbord-of-solutions-for-global-warming.html …
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A layer of pollution hovering over Los Angeles last fall.
Opinion | A Smorgasbord of Solutions for Global Warming
An environmentalist and author tells Fixes how his organization rates the benefits of measures already in use to minimize climate change.
nytimes.com