#PROJECT DRAWDOWN HOW TO#

Hawken and Ravenhill will need that army to pull off their audacious vision. The two have recruited more than 80 advisors, partners, scientists, government agencies and participating universities, along with more than 200 graduate students. Today, Ravenhill is Project Drawdown’s executive director and, with Hawken, the book’s co-editor. No one else is doing it,’” Hawken recounted. “One day we were just riffing, and we started talking about drawdown and said, ‘Let’s do it. Last year, Hawken began teaching at the Presidio Graduate School, alongside climate activist and entrepreneur Amanda Joy Ravenhill. I felt that the goal should be drawdown, which is a year-to-year reduction of carbon from the upper atmosphere, period.” “There’s no such thing as stabilization at 450 or 550 ppm,” he said. Most focus on the seemingly pragmatic goal of stabilizing greenhouse gases at some level, expressed in parts per million, or ppm, that would be tolerable - or at least not catastrophic, from economic, environmental and social perspectives. The idea of “drawdown” - actually reducing greenhouse gas concentrations so that global temperatures drop - hasn’t been part of the conversation, at least among the United Nations crowd, climate activists or cleantech companies. When the activist Bill McKibben wrote the seminal article, “ Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” in Rolling Stone in 2012, Hawken asked, “Why aren’t we doing the math on the solutions? Somebody should come up with a list and see what it requires so you get to drawdown.” “It made me feel like it wasn’t possible to address climate change, rather than giving me hope.” “It made me feel like this is intractable, that it requires such Promethean work by such mammoth institutions, with policy changes that are more than structural,” he recalled. The solutions that had been proffered over the years were all seemingly out of reach - ungodly amounts of solar and wind energy that would be required, for example, or the mass adoption of futuristic, unproven technologies. The project grew out of Hawken’s frustration with actionable, scalable solutions that would make a meaningful dent in the atmosphere’s growing accumulation of greenhouse gases.

#PROJECT DRAWDOWN HOW TO#

It is a reflection back to the world what we are doing and know how to do right this second.”

“The book is not a plan,” Hawken explained to me recently. For each, Hawken and his team will “do the numbers,” providing detailed, science-based data and econometric models showing how each plays out, based on current technology and how it will likely evolve over the project’s 30-year horizon. Project Drawdown, as it is named, will produce a book in 2016, detailing the costs and benefits of scores of climate solutions, from light bulb technology to livestock techniques to literacy for teenage girls. You read that right: to reduce, not just stabilize, atmospheric CO2 and other gases, in order to reverse rising global temperatures. Today, at the Greenbuild conference in New Orleans, entrepreneur and author Paul Hawken will publicly unveil a project, more than a year in the works, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. Catch Paul Hawken in person next week at VERGE SF 2014, Oct.

Project drawdown