Page 62 - Green Builder July-August 2017 Issue

ENERGY S0LUTIONS

Sustainable Power From This Day Forward

Project Drawdown: Here and Now

So what if Trump doesn’t believe in climate change? Some of us are

going ahead with the fight anyway.

BY MARTIN O’MALLEY

HE MIND ONCE ENLIGHTENED cannot again become that it is not enough to level off emissions. We must actually redesign
dark.” So said American Revolutionary leader and writer our human activities on the surface of this Earth so that we draw
Thomas Paine. So say we all. more carbon and other harmful emissions out of the atmosphere
Just because President Trump chooses not to lead on every year than we pump into it. And we can.
T climate change doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t. As our website says: “Drawdown maps, measures, models and
Just last month, my own State of Maryland gave a unanimous go- describes the 100 most-substantive solutions to global warming. For
ahead for the largest offshore windfarm ever constructed near the each solution, we describe its history, the carbon impact it provides,
U.S. Atlantic Coast. Globally, half of all investment in new energy the relative cost and savings, the path to adoption and how it works.
production is toward development of renewable energy. Green The goal of the research that informs Drawdown is to determine if
building technology and adoption is rapidly spreading and becoming we can reverse the buildup of atmospheric carbon within 30 years.
more commonplace. No temporary occupant of the White House can All solutions modeled are already in place, well understood, analyzed
change all of that. based on peer-reviewed science and are expanding around the world.”
Humanity has reach a vital inflection point of understanding. Adele Peters, writing for the website MatterofTrust.org, lays out
It is possible—with existing technology and science—to reverse and the practical audacity of achieving Drawdown in this way:
draw down the amount of carbon dioxide we humans pump into the air.
Read that sentence again.
There is no typo.
Project Drawdown—the most comprehensive plan ever proposed
to reverse global warming—shows us how.
“Drawdown” has been led, inspired and edited by renowned
environmentalist Paul Hawken—a man I am honored to call a friend.
Paul is one of the most fearless and inspiring American leaders in the
world today on the great challenge of climate change. His magnum
opus is a research project of global proportions: Drawdown: The
Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.
Drawing from the best science on best practices, this new book—
published by Penguin in 12 different languages—is a crowd-sourced
healing of the deepest and potentially most far-reaching kind. CREDIT: ELIJAH ALLAN-BLITZ
Don’t let the words “book,” “research” or “science” fool you. This is
not another exercise in connecting the dots of physics into a straight
line that leads us all to hell.
Paul brings to this project the “can-do American pragmatism”—and
belief—that created the American Revolution, won the World Wars “Nothing new needs to be
and landed a man on the moon. It has been my great honor to serve
with many others on the advisory board of this critically needed work. invented. The solutions are in
For the record, environmental “drawdown” is that point in time
when the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere place and in action.”
begins to decline on a year-to-year basis.
Most people with a basic understanding of the problem understand —Paul Hawken

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