“It has nothing to do with drawing.”
I talk a lot about environmental science. I mentioned it last week. I mentioned it last year. And I’ve mentioned it a few times in between, too. Generally, I like to think I’m a pretty optimistic person, but I’ve noted that most of my articles about environmental science tend to lean kind of heavy on the doom and gloom side of things. And while it’s true that if we don’t do something about climate change society as we know it may collapse, and while it’s true that not nearly enough is being done right now, and while it’s true that the United States is the largest historic polluter and refuses to take responsibility for its actions, it’s also true that there is hope. In fact, depending on who you ask, there’s an abundance of hope.
That’s where Project Drawdown comes in. Everyone knows of different ways they can help the environment, but Project Drawdown is the only source I’ve seen to categorize, list, and quantifiable measure every possible solution to climate change. It’s essentially a scientific organization/think tank that researches and compiles data regarding every reasonable strategy to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and lessen the impacts of climate change, and it has some of the most positive outlooks on the future that I’ve ever seen. Today, I wish to share some of that hope with you.
Project Drawdown has eighty different methods of atmospheric carbon reduction, and it ranks them all based on how many gigatons of carbon dioxide (or projected future carbon dioxide equivalents) they can remove from the atmosphere, ranging on a scale of less than one gigaton to almost 90 gigatons. For some reference, in 2017 the USA produced about 5.1 metric gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and the world as a whole about 37 metric gigatons. That’s a lot of carbon dioxide.
Obviously, it hasn’t always been this bad. Even just in 1990 the world produced “only” 22 gigatons of carbon. But this has been happening for a long time, and all that carbon has to go somewhere. Sometimes it gets taken into plants, or into the oceans, or deposited around the world. But for the most part, it just sits in the atmosphere, trapping more heat and causing the planet to warm. We’ve upped the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a timescale that, compared to the rest of history, is monstrously fast, and we aren’t slowing down anytime soon. So we get a warming planet, more extreme weather, more natural disasters, and an unstable climate. That’s the problem.
In theory, it’s pretty easy to fix. Just cut global carbon emissions down to lower levels and then, over time, begin reducing, or “drawing down,” carbon from the atmosphere. This’ll bring carbon dioxide levels, eventually, back to pre-industrial stages, and should help ease or even reverse the damage we’ve already done. Now, there’s a lot more to it than just that, but the idea is simple. It’s the implementation that gets people riled up, because all these solutions cost money. Lots of money.
Return Project Drawdown. Not only do each of their solutions come with an amount of carbon reduction, but each one also comes with a price tag and, more importantly, how much money we’ll save by implementing that particular solution. How does spending money save money, you might ask? The same way that going to a doctor for regular checkups is cheaper than emergency surgery; if we stop the problems from happening then we don’t have to pay for them down the line. And if Project Drawdown is right, we can save a lot of money that way.
Looking at their conveniently designed chart, Project Drawdown proposes that, should all 80 solutions be adopted in their complete forms, we can reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by 1034 gigatons. This is enough to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 470 parts per million (or ppm, a measure of the concentration of a fluid in a given space). But today, we only need to reduce it by between 100 and 150 ppm to reach pre-industrial levels, meaning that the solutions propose by Project Drawdown actually have a lot of wiggle room to be both incorrectly predicted, or even not implemented at all.
Looking at the costs of everything is similarly pleasing. The overall cost of everything, of implementing all 80 solutions, is about $30 trillion dollars. Sheesh. That’s a lot of money by any standard. The entire GDP of the USA is about $20 trillion, with the world at about $90 trillion. But here’s the thing, then; climate change, and climate change solutions, aren’t the sole responsibility of any single country, and it doesn’t have to happen immediately. That estimated $30 trillion doesn’t have to happen all at once, in a single country, or even to that extreme level; like I said, there’s some buffer space between what we can do and what we need to do. That being said, if each country contributes an amount of money to the solution that’s proportionally equal to their contribution to the problem, the USA would be responsible for about 25% of the costs of the solution. Personally, I think that’s a fair assessment, but that’s a whole other story.
What’s more important, though, is the savings that these solutions are expected to generate. And while not every solution is a winner, with a few that actually do lose money over their lifetime, the overall amount of money saved by avoiding the impacts of climate change is estimated at about $75 trillion, or more than double the cost of preventing climate change. In theory, for every dollar you invest in preventing climate change, you’ll save two and a half dollars in the future by not having to, say, rebuild all of Miami when it gets destroyed by a super-hurricane, or not having to bail out every Midwestern farmer when a heat wave destroys American agriculture.
On a long-term investment scale, and in fact on the scale of human and societal survivability, the answer is obvious. We have to implement these solutions. If not for the fact that we want society to be around in a thousand years, then for the fact that we’ll save trillions of dollars by stopping a problem that we created. Not solving climate change is like shooting yourself in the foot and then wondering why you’re bleeding out, and then ignoring all the blood and claiming that it happened naturally and isn’t a problem. It’s ludicrous.
The reason this hasn’t happened yet, and the reason why there’s so much resistance to it, is the fact that people either a) don’t believe in climate change at all, b) don’t care or don’t understand the impact it will have, or c) don’t want to pay the upfront costs of survival. Some of these are more easily remediated than others, but that, like I said before, is a whole other story.
Those numbers, though, give me hope. They give me a lot of hope, and I hope they’re right, but what also gives me a lot of hope are the actual solutions to the climate crisis that Project Drawdown presents. They’re easily understood, effective, and all possible with modern technology. The best part is that implementing some of them will even solve other world crises.
For example, two of the highest-rated solutions are educating girls and family planning. These go hand in hand to lower CO2 in a couple major ways, with the primary method being population control. It’s well-documented that as women become wealthier and societies become more equal, birth rates drop off and population growth decreases. This is ideal because it reduces the number of people who are born and contributing to global warming while also decreasing stress on things like industry, agriculture, and electricity generation. And, since societies tend to use fewer resources as they become richer (after a certain point, anyway), educating girls helps to lessen poverty as well, which also contributes to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and reducing the future outputs of CO2, not to mention the social justice value inherent in educating impoverished women and communities. It’s a multi-pronged solution that has numerous positive outcomes regardless of what scale it’s implemented at. Any sort of implementation is beneficial to both the world and individuals.
The whole list is like this. Refrigerant management reduces future CO2 equivalent emissions while also helping with volatile organic chemicals, which cause problems like smog. Onshore wind turbines help cut back from a dependence on fossil fuels which not only reduces CO2 emissions but also increases power grid stability and creates jobs. Reduced food waste and plant rich diets not only decrease the need for agriculture but also can help with the American obesity epidemic and the rate of land use change for agriculture. And the list goes on and on, with dozens of possible solutions that will all make the world a better place.
A lot of the solutions require change at a large-scale societal level, but some of them are ones that individuals can do, too. Like reducing food waste and eating a plant-rich diet, or investing in electric cars and renewable energy generation. There are tons of possibilities for reducing carbon emissions and improving the world. Some, sure, are more effective than others, but they all help, and that’s what’s important.
The world needs our help. There are a lot of problems out there that these solutions won’t directly solve, like microplastics in the ocean and deadly algal blooms, but the biggest crisis facing humanity as a species, climate change, is a problem that we can fix. We have the solutions in reach. We have technology. We have the resources. We have the know-how. We just need the drive to do it. And that’s why every person matters in this; we need as many people as possible to want to fix this problem, because if we don’t work together, it’s going to affect everyone.
So, eat less meat. Bike or walk more. Say no to that plastic bag. Vote for candidates that promote green policies, and boycott companies that aren’t making a positive difference. As the meme goes, we don’t need one person doing zero waste perfectly. We need a million people doing zero waste imperfectly.
Or, in this case, we need a whole planet. We can do it. We just need to start doing it.
Maybe you could provide a list of companies that we should avoid? And ones that we should frequent? 😊