Here’s a painfully hard truth: There is no single silver bullet that will save us from the effects of climate change.
But according to a new book, there are 80 existing silver bullets — plus 20 more nascent technologies and solutions — that could work together to reverse global warming and put the planet on the path to sustainability. The top-ten list includes renewable energy solutions most of us are familiar with, such as wind and solar, but also some more unexpected strategies, including refrigeration management, reducing food waste, educating girls and family planning.
Each solution is ranked according to how much CO2 it will save, how much money it will cost and its total economic savings. Cumulatively the 80 solutions profiled in the book would save more than 1,000 gigatons of emissions and produce nearly $74 trillion in economic value between 2020 and 2050, after an initial cost of $27 trillion.
“All our data is based on science,” says environmental entrepreneur and author Paul Hawken, editor of “Drawdown.” (The book has a bold subtitle: “The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.”) Hawken and the team of researchers at his nonprofit Drawdown Project spent the past few years analyzing data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Energy Agency, World Bank and other institutions, plus other peer-reviewed research, to come up with their list of solutions.
It wasn’t easy, Hawken admits. “When we first started it we would go around saying, why hasn’t anybody done this?” he says. “I mean, we can Google just about anything and rank it — the biggest blogs, the most followers on Twitter. But here we have the greatest crisis human civilization has ever faced and you cannot find a list of the most substantive solutions to address global warming.”
The solutions that you can find right now on Google are what Hawken calls “proverbs” — things like walking more or buying less stuff. “No question those are very true things, but they’re not solutions and they’re not measured,” he says. “You can’t cost them. You can’t invest in them. It’s kind of like saying ‘love your mother.’ It doesn’t tell you what to do and how to do it.”
The book flips that equation, providing concrete rankings for each solution and brief examinations of how to implement each one on a global scale, all of which will be expanded upon on the Drawdown Project’s website. The list includes everything from building better cars to implementing improved rice-cultivation techniques, and from developing electric bikes to supporting indigenous people as land stewards.
“Drawdown” even includes some potentially controversial solutions, such as waste-to-energy and nuclear power, both of which the book calls “regret solutions” that could have both high value and potentially higher costs.
“Our job was to be objective,” says Hawken of the decision to include nuclear in the book. “We said we’re going to model the top 100 solutions. We’re not promoting or demoting anything. Nuclear was one that I struggled with because I think it’s just the most absurd and ridiculous way you could ever imagine to boil water.” The book notes that the new, smaller generation of nuclear power plants could change the equation, but still create a waste issue that would last for thousands of years.
Hawken says “Drawdown” isn’t the type of book you’d give to someone as a gift — although it is beautifully illustrated — but instead one that will find life in schools and universities. “Students have had it up to here with books and literature about what’s going to happen if we don’t act or don’t act sufficiently,” he says. “It’s terrifying and sort of immobilizing. Students want to know what to do. They want solutions.”
He also believes the book will find audiences among philanthropists and impact investors, as well as policymakers ranging from international bodies to city councils — in other words, people who want to know where to put their money to do the most good.
Hawken doesn’t expect “Drawdown” to have much of an impact on the policies of the Trump administration; but on the upside, he also doesn’t believe the Trump administration will have much impact on the book’s solutions.
“Two days after the election I looked at every solution one by one and thought, ‘Okay, what will happen to this solution if we have a very ignorant and obstreperous administration and Congress?’ And actually, it was like not much, really, not much at all. It almost had zero impact,” he says.
In fact, Hawken thinks President Trump may actually be good for the environment in an unexpected manner. “If anything, the election might have had a positive impact in a kind of perverse way, because people are going to maybe double down on stuff because they’re not happy with the administration,” he says. “The resistance is massive, growing, and unrelenting and will not stop until he’s out of office.”
Drawdown: The Top Ten Solutions
When Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” talks about “a mass extinction crisis, with a rate of extinction now 1,000 times higher than the normal background rate,” that’s the research my group and I do that he’s quoting. Journalists often ask how I get up in the morning, given how depressing is the subject. Well, it’s not what we spend most of our time doing!
Nature’s extraordinary resilience fills me with hope.
In short, I focus on the individual. My research and conservation work focuses on wild ring-tailed lemurs, an endangered species, and it is important that I know and recognize each lemur that I study and follow. I know what each lemur eats, who they are or aren’t friends with, where they sleep, and I also recognize when things change. If “Pinkie” or “the Hamburglar” weren’t around one day, or if their trees were missing, I’d know; it would matter and I could potentially do something about it.
Prior to becoming directly involved in the environmental conservation movement, I was pessimistic about the future of the planet. However, my pessimism was replaced by optimism as soon as I took action and started doing my part to improve the state of the world and the situation for wildlife and threatened species. I have seen firsthand the positive contributions made by a multitude of individuals who dedicate themselves to protecting amphibian populations and promoting a society that respects and appreciates nature and wildlife.
In spite of the various political things going on in the world, in conservation we’ve actually had some good news over the last six months, on international wildlife trafficking and specifically on elephants. First, the CITES meeting in Johannesburg in 2016 represented a real sea change from CITES being seen primarily as a mechanism to promote and regulate trade in endangered species to equally a mechanism for protecting endangered species from unsustainable international trade. And 
I remind myself often that it is in our nature to gravitate toward narratives that are dystopian or utopian, even though reality usually lies somewhere in between. I seek out narratives that paint a more nuanced portrait of our world, drawn to those with a more optimistic outlook that help keep me positive and motivated. It was with this in mind that we at Global Wildlife Conservation developed the 
