Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse Global Warming | Hacker News Reader

Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse Global Warming

drawdown.org

115 pointsbiz8476 comments

So zero political solutions here? Just a list of technological aspects of a solution?

How can people not know that the problem here is getting people to do something, it is definitely not that we don't know what to do which is a minor problem in comparison.

What about a group who have starving children and will clear-cut a forest to feed them no matter what agreements are in place? How much violence is used to enforce this plan and how is it organized? How are these projects funded, where does the money come from and what is done with those who are powerful and won't cooperate?

It is hard enough to get international cooperation now, and as climate related refugee problems multiply exponentially it will not get easier. Technocrats are not saving us here.

Doesn't it seem though that politics is a deadlock, with nations playing a game of chicken that has no winner? It's a case of the tragedy of the commons. No power broker is going to sacrifice their economy or political backers enough to make a difference, as there would always be someone else with a more short term view take advantage of their temporary weakness.

It seems that there is no feasible solution other than technical, however unlikely a technical solution is.

The Paris Agreement was an attempt at fixing that problem. I think it's still the way forward.

No it wasn't. It was an attempt to start thinking about the problem. Everyone knows it is completely insufficient. I agree that we need it, even dearly, but we do need to focus on creating easier and more commercially advantageous solutions to reduce the amount of force (political or otherwise) required to implement an effective solution. Otherwise, frankly, forget it. People are going to be kicking and screaming against it and we just don't have the time for their bs. So studies like these are also insufficient, but in my opinion one of the more important aspects of moving forward with just getting this done rather than talking about it.

The Drawdown looks like it’s trying to help the policy makers on how to effectively reduce CO2. Different countries are making different decisions that work for them.

I’m not sure why someone is complaining about this book. It seems like it would quite helpful.

The Paris Agreement, for example, lets countries decide what’s best for them.

For instance, according to the site, onshore wind turbines appear to be one of the better solutions for generating electricity.

84.6 GIGATONS REDUCED CO2

$1.23 TRILLION NET IMPLEMENTATION COST

$7.43 TRILLION NET OPERATIONAL SAVINGS

You are right, but only if you discount the more extreme solutions to those tragedy of the commons/power broker problems.

There is a historically effective solution to those problems, the one we all hate to think about, that has a high likelihood of failure, causes massive amounts of suffering and has multi-generation length unintended consequences: violence.

As I mentioned in another comment, by the time it is clear to the common person that their immediate suffering is due to climate change that could have been prevented by political means, it will have been too late. Mass uprisings typically do not overthrow governments until immediate survival is threatened.

Oh definitely, realistically it's not going to happen, certainly not in time. I was treating that more as a hypothetical.

The problem is that the economical background of our society is based on exploiting all resources and pushing the limits of the society itself (both with high reproduction rates and in mass production of goods).

If we want to change the climate situation, we first need to change the whole economic system and related political measures.

Speaking more as an engineer than as a contrarian here: If that's your plan, you're going to fail at it.

That's definitely what Kings used to say. And chieftains of hunter/gatherer tribes before them.

When you say "our society is based on ... high reproduction rates", which society are you talking about, and which reproduction rates?

Currently most of humanity has less than replacement level of fertility:

http://www.economist.com/node/14743589

Are you saying that the economy is failing because of low reproduction rates?

I agree with you, but my point is that is impossible, because of said power brokers not willing to risk their power.

If history relied on those in power giving up their power, rather than people taking power away from them, we would be living in a very different world.

Political vs. technological is a false dichotomy. There are many other dimensions to the world. Personally, I think we need a monumental social breakthrough akin to the enlightenment to solve climate change.

But people don't rebel until some force was clearly threatening their survival. If people rebel only when their immediate survival is threatened by global warming, it will already be too late.

I have a pet theory that there is some self indulgent delusion in not recognizing the real issue in order to preemptively take the high ground for an "I told you so."

In many multiplayer games for example, I've seen many support or healer character be the most toxic. By playing the non-fun helper healer, he or she takes the high ground to blame the rest of the team, oblivious that the toxicity is destroying the real thing that matters.

I sense something similar in some developers I work with and some in this proposal as well. Which isn't to say that technical experts giving technical advice and political experts giving political advice isn't good. It's just a similarity I feel.

Counter theory: People who really really want to win play less-fun more-important characters.

EDIT: And then when they don't win they get upset.

And are aware that they are more serious and have put more thought into their ideas. So they are much more likely to say "I told you so" because, often, they literally did.

Political arguing about CO2 and warming has been going on for 20 years or so and the atmospheric CO2 levels keep rising. If there is going to be a fix it will probably have a big tech aspect like solar + batteries becoming really cheap.

Climate refugees have a large shot at flipping the cost / benefit ratio here. If we can get someone to enthusiastically explain we need to solve this problem by paying labor in OH, PA etc to work together with scientists and businesses right now. Or else we are gonna pay relocating a bunch of people, paying for wars, and generally just wasting a ton of bad money. It’s a problem with solutions that could really unite a bunch of people who are really divided right now, and history is calling for someone to step up and seize it

All serious estimates I've seen suggest dealing with climate change is much cheaper than ignoring it (this Drawdown book agrees, and suggest 70 Trillion in benefits on a 20 Trillion investment).

I wouldn't be surprised if climate migration was included in those costs, though I guess in terms of human death and misery translated into monetary terms, rather than "ooh scary immigrants".

It's kind of weird how that has been successfully kept out of the conversation. Reminds me of all the headlines I read, even from sympathetic sources about the "high cost" of single payer healthcare, when again, serious estimates suggest it's cheaper overall.

This is a political solution.

This provides lists of actions that countries would probably want to do anyway, and provides estimates of carbon savings. When trying to meet international treaties for reducing carbon emissions the countries now have a long list of positive actions they can take to make their countries stronger, cleaner and wealthier while meeting their goals.

Nit picking on one issue: Nuclear. I'm glad they at least listed it as a solution but I feel that there's way too much agenda in here that isn't based on the science.

It has potential to avoid emissions, but there are many reasons for concern: deadly meltdowns, tritium releases, abandoned uranium mines, mine-tailings pollution, radioactive waste, illicit plutonium trafficking, and thefts of missile material, among them. [1]

Nevermind:

* that >60% of the carbon-free electricity in the USA comes from nukes right now,

* that by displacing air pollution, nukes worldwide have saved 1.8 million lives and prevented 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq [2]

* that nobody died or is expected to die from radiation at Fukushima

* that uranium enrichment is by far the easiest way to illicitly traffic weapons materials (which can happen without any nuclear power)

* that Hanford was a cold-war nuclear weapons facility that did not prioritize waste storage, and that it was totally unrelated to commercial power generation

The capabilities of nuclear energy to thwart climate change are real and gigantic. Getting costs down would help, and the Koreans have been doing an amazing job at that. The French electrified their whole country with nukes in 10 years by standardizing designs and that's been wildly successful. This solution should have said something like: "If we can standardize a safe Gen III+ reactor and get costs down, nuclear can and will grow as our climate champion."

[1] http://www.drawdown.org/solutions/energy/nuclear [2] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197

Coal, gas, etc increased global warming - but we are talking about timescales of <100 years (sometimes <50) to reverse those changes with appropriate action. Nuclear is not like that, it takes thousands of years (plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24000 years) to undo or cleanup anything related to nuclear. When we started with coal/oil/gas/etc - we didn't know at that time about these side effects. Now the same could be said about nuclear as well. If radioactive material 10 times the size of chernobyl fallout [1] was released, would that mean the perpetual end of earth, possibly leading to a worse than climate-change kind of scenario? That's why countries like Germany have started shutting down nuclear power plants. Its like favoring a known evil rather than an unknown devil.

Note: I'm neither a proponent or opponent of nuclear energy.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an...

I think you're right that that's what people are concerned about. I'd mention that we have 17,000 reactor-years of commercial experience over the past 7 decades in nuclear. We understand the risks fairly well, though admittedly we are still learning. It is clear that nuclear reactors net save millions of lives over fossil-fuel alternatives. 10x Chernobyl fallout would be very bad but it would be nowhere near the global warming predictions we're seeing. Additionally, Chernobyl was a bad design without a containment running a risky experiment with safety systems turned off. The 4 reactors at Fukushima got hit with a huge earthquake and tsunami and no one died from their failure, and we know from models that no one will die from the radiation that was released. It's exceedingly unlikely that modern reactors would go Chernobyl, much less 10x Chernobyl.

Germany has turned away from clean-air nuclear energy and replaced it with brown coal and more clean-air renewables but that's costing them a lot [1]. That's expensive fear, and only feasible for the richest of nations.

Side note: Long half-life doesn't necessarily correlate with problems after an accident. It's actually the short half-life stuff that is biologically concentrated (Sr-90, I-131, Cs-137) that can cause the biggest issues. For instance, Uranium-238 has a 4.5 billion year half-life and it's not a radiological hazard (this just means the energy comes out really slowly).

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/germany-renewable-clean-energy...

"there's way too much agenda in here that isn't based on the science"

1) The concerns they list are the actual concerns of significant segments of the population. Such as e.g. an overwhelming majority of the German electorate. 2) I personally think that some of those concerns are overweighted. You apparently do as well. 3) Failing to weigh those concerns the way you and I do does not constitute "having an agenda not based on the science", key word "the". 4) They are evenly applying "the" science of GHG reduction to all solutions. It's not their job to follow a specific agenda on the debated science of side topics such as those you single out.

Nuclear power activates identity framing for a lot of people. For some it is anti-, but for others it is pro-. The anti-nuclear people typically own the identity issue. The pro-nuclear people sometimes do, but sometimes want to claim a "these are the scientific facts with which it is irrational to agree" kind of super-identity.

Good points. I guess "bias" is more of the word that I was looking for than "agenda". My concern is that they're parroting unproductive fears about nuclear energy that society has gone critical with without pointing out some key facts that are pivotal to fighting climate change, such as that nuclear reactors are gigawatt-scale, 24/7 reliable, carbon-free electricity generators that demonstrably have killed fewer people per kWh than almost anything else out there.

But you're right that they're parroting what many people would parrot because that's how social memes work. I guess it's on me to expose more people to reasoning that convinces them that atomic energy is a good path in our fight against climate change.

I notice a contradiction in two of your points that happened to fall together:

Apparently nuclear displacing other generation saves many lives, yet Fukushima, which shut down Japan's Nuclear didn't cost any lives. It seems like your trying to have it both ways.

Aha! Excellent observation! However, I said that no one died or will die from radiation released at Fukushima, which I stand by. But people did die during the mandated evacuation (many people ironically evacuated to places with naturally higher radiation than they would have gotten had they stayed), and yes, people will die from increased air pollution that results from shutting down the nukes.

So people died because they were afraid of radiation, not because of the radiation itself [1]. This is why I feel we need to push back against fear-driven outcry against nuclear and try to keep it based on things we can measure.

To be fair, during Fukushima the policymakers didn't know how dangerous the radiation was going to be so calling the evacuation was tough. So building reactors with proper safety systems for their environment is also a total necessity moving forward. The high-water line in the area was known to be closer to 20m than the 10m seawall that they had built there.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...

Let's assume that for a moment all their numbers are correct (it's a huge assumption) and let's also assume that they will all be achieved (cough).

Their numbers add up to approximately 100% of 2017 annual fossil fuel emissions.

That means that all of the excess CO2 currently in the atmosphere is beyond the reach of the combined 80 solutions they propose. Greenhouse gas production rates continue to increase (Earth has plenty of semi-natural processes of its own that are only starting to be triggered). You can't double-count these 80 solutions, so they're inadequate to even stop the growth.

"drawdown" seems a misnomer. There's no reversal here, only a slowdown.

This is the most challenging engineering problem ever to confront mankind, and we haven't risen as a species to meet it.

Now, time to get back to the latest ICO, because some things are important.

"Let's assume that for a moment all their numbers are correct (it's a huge assumption)"

The entire framing of their approach is to only consider peer-reviewed literature -- holding themselves to the highest standard we have, the one most free of "assumption." It is rhetorically deceptive to open by characterizing them as making assumptions.

Only if you discount the evidence that we are almost always optimistic about these things at this stage of the research.

Anyone good at doing high level policy accounts for the fact that you always need a lot of margin for optimistic error when combining multiple solutions.

Citation please. Bonus points for noting the irony that you are criticizing an impeccably supported work with sweeping (but unsupported) assertions.

Table of the top 100 solutions:

http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

I think the most interesting way to sort this data is not by "total atmospheric reduction" but rather by "savings". I.e., where do the economic and ecological incentives align?

EVs and Wind & Solar are unsurprising gold/silver/bronze winners.

District Heating is an interesting idea I had never thought of. And it synthesizes well with other top winners outside of the energy production space, most of which boil down to "improved density and less moving around".

IMO these are all big wins from a lifestyle perspective as well, all other things equal (of course, not all other things are equal in most places -- schooling, safety, etc.)

I hear often that educating girls will curb population growth in poor countries.

Has anyone actually proven that this is a causative relationship and not correlative?

Yes https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/the-relationship-betw...

http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2009/karimpolicysem...

Educating girls in poor countries, I'll posit, offers the only hope for a future without recurring mass violence. The empirical evidence is that where girls are educated, they acquire power to control their own fertility, and also the will to do so, that being the best means to concentrate limited household resources toward quality education for their own children.

And this voluntary, culturally-based impetus toward population control is the only plausible moderator of the runaway consumption of critical resources that now threatens mass suffering on a civilizational scale. CO2 uptake capacity of the biosphere being of course only one critical, supply-constrained resource among several, e.g. fresh water, fertile land, fisheries.

Political systems on the other hand are everywhere far too weak to look to for effective action. Here's a timely reminder: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-epa-museum-histor...

This is true even in the United States

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/9/education-lev...

I think trying to argue specifically about climate change in the US at least - is dead - politics as such prevent the scope of change needed - that said - we as a planet should work more on sustainability - there are technological and cultural solutions that can be put in place, (mostly by private industry) to make the way we consume our planets limited natural resources more sustainable.

Carbon as far as I'm concerned has turned into a straw man preventing us on working on the larger (and more complex) problem of sustainability.

I think another thing to consider for a moment is, if we want a "western" standard of living for all people living on this planet, we either need less people, or we need to figure out how to use the limited resources we have a lot more efficiently.

Humans in the end will adapt to a warmer planet - the range of habitable places however may change - this says nothing to the other animals living here - they're not so lucky.

Fewer people.

It only covers two types of solutions, reducing carbon emissions and carbon sequestration. What about more extreme or dangerous solutions such as weather manipulation and reflecting solar energy through materials in orbit?

They are dangerous, as you say. If you had to choose between global warming and a new ice age, what would you prefer?

They chose to be intellectually conservative in their first round of work. They are attempting to find peer-reviewed, quantified estimates for as many approaches as they can manage.

My personal thought is to make a geoengineering company to perform carbon sequestration. At first you would figure out how to grow large amounts of switchgrass and or algae using some type of automated planting either in deserts or in the ocean. Then start breeding or make GMO plants that would more efficiently sequester carbon. Also, try to make other systems that would lower temperature like a space based shade or changing the albedo of the ground or atmosphere .

These approaches are discussed in the book.

Doesn't seem this stands to make money, so not many people will be interested.

We humans are really inventive in ways of making money. Bringing more unhospitable lands back to sanity? Allowing for more consumption without the need to curb lifestyles? A lot of money can be made from here.

Sorry, this is all flawed. Just an agenda of constraining ourselves and limiting human influence. Won't work. We humans are inherently driven to expand and use more and more energy for our needs. This is a given. Any solutions trying to ignore this are doomed.

What we need is technological solutions to _reverse_ global warming effects. Like iron fertilization of oceans.

No geoengineering?

Yeah not sure about geoengineering but if you look at global CO2 emission and absorption, man made emissions are still small compared to nature - see this in giggatons https://static.skepticalscience.com/images/Carbon_Cycle.gif

From a practical point of view if you want to absorb huge amounts of CO2 finding ways to influence the natural processes might be the way.

(pic from https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natu...)

Howdy! I work in cleantech, and I guess it's that time again for a what-can-you-do-about-it post :)

To start, here's my favorite climate change joke: "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

==So what can you do about it?==

The biggest thing this article doesn't say that is most relevant to the HN audience is that you can work at a new energy technology company! Our industries are out of the R&D stage and are currently focused on scale and growth[1], and we need as many smart people as we can get. There are lots of companies hiring software engineers (including mine).

==How do I find a job fighting climate change?==

I'd recommend browsing the exhibitor and speaker lists from the most recent conference in each sector (linked below). Check out the companies that interest you and see if they are hiring.

    * Energy Storage[2][3]
    * Solar[4][5]
    * Wind[6]
    * Nuclear[7]
    * Electric Utilities[8][9]
    * Electric vehicles[10]

Also, if you're in the SF bay area, I'd recommend subscribing to my Bay Area Energy Events Calendar[11]. Just start showing up to events and you'll probably find a job really quickly.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/22/energy-is-the-new-new-inte...

[2]: http://www.esnaexpo.com/

[3]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/u.s.-energy-stora...

[4]: https://www.intersolar.us/

[5]: http://www.solarpowerinternational.com/

[6]: http://www.windpowerexpo.org/

[7]: https://www.nei.org/Conferences

[8]: http://www.distributech.com/index.html

[9]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/grid-edge-world-f...

[10]: http://tec.ieee.org/

[11]: https://bayareaenergyevents.com/

I have a background in electrical/computer engineering, but much of that has faded from memory. For the past 15 years I've been a software developer, starting out in the embedded space, and today working on cloud telecom. I feel like I don't have the background or domain knowledge required to break into a career in clean energy, though it's a space that interests me a lot (both intellectually, and because of survival-of-the-species reasons). Do you have any suggestions how I might break into this field, beyond attending the events you listed (or is that enough?)? Is there a need for my skills more or less as-is, or am I looking at a steep learning curve and more "entry-level" positions until I can train up?

You sound like an excellent candidate for an SWE position at quite a few cleantech companies "as-is".

I stopped at "telepresence". This is silly, and as published as a pay for book, I suspect it will actually cost the environment more from it's printing and shipping than the influence it will have to make a change.

Before proposing multi trillion dollar plans it'd be good to figure out how to model cloud cover and the effects of the oceans.

This comment constitutes gaslighting. The primary expression of climate change science, the IPCC, has been based on models which incorporate cloud cover and oceans for decades. Here is the first sentence of their landing page on models:

"Numerical models (General Circulation Models or GCMs), representing physical processes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and land surface, are the most advanced tools currently available for simulating the response of the global climate system to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations (criterion 1 -- see list here)."

http://www.ipcc-data.org/guidelines/pages/gcm_guide.html

Read a bit further in the page you've linked.

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