100 Best Climate Solutions - And Why They're Going to Work
Few are optimistic about reversing the effects of global warming. And then there’s Paul Hawken, an entrepreneur and environmentalist whose optimism runs counter to the norm. We decided it would be a good idea to speak with him about his latest venture, Project Drawdown, a book and digital platform that maps, measures, and models the 100 most substantive solutions to global warming.
Each of the 100 solutions falls under one or more categories of the three things we can do about global warming: stop the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; change to renewable energy low in carbon emissions; and sequestration, bringing carbon back to the earth through photosynthesis. Of the three, sequestration is probably the least understood but most important when it comes to achieving the goal stated in the project’s name: drawdown. Climate drawdown means that we not only limit our carbon emissions, but also begin to lower greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
“All of the solutions we list and model already exist, are well understood and are scaling,” Hawken says. “And virtually all of them are getting less expensive and more practical every year.” What emerges from this list of solutions is some clarity about the path forward on global warming, which, in a media landscape that tends to exacerbate fear and despair around this topic, is a real reason for feeling optimistic. The other reason is that this is the first time we have had a complete list of the top solutions to global warming since climate change came to the fore 40 years ago. Really, the first time.
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Can you give us a specific example of a project in Drawdown and tell us how it works? Reducing food waste is a very important solution. The world wastes about 30% of the food that’s produced. The United States is somewhere between 40–50%. Food waste has a big carbon backpack on it. It takes a lot of energy to create that food in terms of agriculture, emissions of carbon due to tillage of the soil, pesticide and herbicide use, trucking, processing, packaging, delivery to the store, taking it home, and throwing it away.
Reducing food waste allows us to produce less food, changing the impact we have on the land. For example, in the Amazon, where forests are still being burned in order to create land for soybeans, which is for cattle, which is for beef, which is for hamburgers. Anytime you reduce the amount of food you use, you’re going to reduce impact upon the land, especially if it is meat.
https://tricycle.org/magazine/100-best-climate-solutions-theyre-going-work
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