Hawken - Drawdown

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Hawken, 2017) is a well-documented encyclopedia of scientific ideas rather than a story to be read. It is a compilation of various authors' insights on alternatives to fossil fuel use, including various other natural resource reductions, and how each can plausibly lead us out of the current threatening environmental tailspin.

The solutions that are included could all result in "regenerative economic outcomes that create security, produce jobs, improve health, save money, facilitate mobility, eliminate hunger, prevent pollution, restore soil, clean rivers, and more" (p. x). The premise of the entire
book is that atmospheric transformation that is descending upon us requires reimagining almost everything we do. But reimagining is not some far-fetched impossible scenario - it is doable and as citizens of the Earth we have a responsibility to act.

An important principle of the combination of solutions is that each is still emerging, which will result in some strategies being immediately viable while others will improve in potential over time. The book is too extensive to list all the possibilities but options that are included and analyzed are wind turbines, microgrids, geothermal, solar farms, rooftop solar, wave & tidal, biomass, and nuclear. And these solutions can be used in concert by using one source when another is less or not available, providing the opportunity to consistently maintain the necessary levels of power.

Two of the current challenges that require attention are storage and distribution of power. Strategies to store power for when power cannot be generated, such as solar power at night, are essential and will require cooperation across the globe. In order to do this, grid adaptability and storage during peak production must be solved.

As a future treasured resource, which will surely be revised over time, Hawken's book concludes with a summary of the net costs and savings of each of the environmental solutions covered in the book. The bottom line of examining the costs is that repair is less costly than where we are presently headed in coping with environmental degradation and the resulting shortages, disasters, and irrevocable consequences we face. And the concluding sentence - "What it takes to reverse global warming is one person after another remembering who we truly are" (p. 217).