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

Edited by Paul Hawken.

My wife brought this book home from work. It’s a collection of 80 solutions to solve global warming. To get to pre-industrial carbon levels we have to do them all, plus some that we haven’t thought of yet.

The book was published in 2017 but still feels accurate. Each solution is 1-5 pages, along with analysis of how many gigatons of carbon dioxide (equivalent) that can be reduced.

Fun party question… what is the #1 most effective solution proposed by the book? Answer: refrigerants. Destroy them at end of life and prevent them from entering the atmosphere, where they are thousands of times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

They grouped the solutions by category when I would have preferred they ordered them by overall effectiveness. (Didn’t get to #1 Refrigeration until page 164.)

An interesting theme that jumped out at me was the thoughtful use of trees… In addition to sequestering carbon themselves, trees help with raising cattle (Silvopasture, p50), growing produce (Tree Intercropping, p58), and preventing the spread of the Sahara desert (p188). An absence of trees on the Mammoth Steppe can keep carbon sequestered (p172).

Empowering women is very important, with educating girls coming in at #6 (p80), and family planning at #7 (p78).

This is a very helpful book for understanding our options for solving global warming.