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A review by nghia
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken
2.0
This is an encyclopedia of 100 technologies to reverse climate change. And just as paper encyclopedias are obsolete and completely replaced by online ones, this is a not very good book. When I say that, I'm talking more about the artifact, the book itself, rather than the content per se. Because the research is actually very good! It is a fascinating springboard into countless hours of research. You've heard about solar power and electric cars and smart thermostats. But you've probably heard less, if anything, about grid flexibility, silvopasture, multistrata agroforestry, tree intercropping, and improved ship designs. Like other encyclopedias this isn't really a book designed to be read cover to cover, it is meant to be dipped into leisurely from time to time. Like other encyclopedias the individual chapters vary somewhat in quality, having been written by different authors.
The problem is just that all of this works much better online. So don't buy this book and instead just look at their website. (Disclaimer: I said that before looking at their website and seeing how amazingly terrible it is. Still, I stand by "this works better as a website than a book", even if they seem to be incompetent at building a website.)
Why don't I like this as a book? Let's start with the small quibbles. I read the e-book and there are several charts that are impossible to read due to small size and low quality. That's pretty common on e-books. But they include links to bigger versions! Awesome! Except four of the six links no longer work -- just three years after the book came out.
The organization is haphazard to the point of incoherence. Are the entries in alphabetical order? Nope, "Wind Turbines" comes before "Microgrids". Are they in order of ranking? Nope, "Wave and Tidal" at #29 is listed before "Concentrated Solar" at #25. Are they in some sort of thematic grouping? Not really. "Silvopasture", "Tree Intercropping", and "Multistrata Agroforestry" aren't next to one another and are instead separated by completely unrelated strategies like "Improved Rice Cultivation". The #1 strategy, "Refrigeration", comes 67% of the way into the book.
There is zero "signposting" on individual entries to help you put them into context. Open it at random to a given strategy: LED Lighting (Household). Rank: #33. Reduced CO2: 7.81 gigatons. Net cost: $323.5 billion. Net savings: $1.73 trillion. Is...that a lot? Or not much? Is that one of the more expensive strategies? Or is it really cheap? It is very easy to get lost in the details and the book's design does nothing really to help you out.
While I understand the marketing appeal of the book -- this certainly got a lot more notice than just a website would have! -- I just think it doesn't work especially well as a book and that's my single biggest complaint.
I have a few other smaller complaints. The title promises a "comprehensive plan" but there's actually no plan in the book. It is just a bunch of building blocks for a plan. This really comes out at the end of each section where they briefly explain their reasoning for the numbers they provide. It is often very unclear to me whether their model is based on "the status quo just keeps on keeping on" or massive global advocacy or something else. For instance in the section on "Tropical Forests" it states:
So....no extra work is necessary here? We're done? Good job everyone!
Or when they talk about reducing food waste they write
But...what's their actual plan to get reducing food waste by 50%? A suspiciously round number that sounds made up, by the way. More like a hope or a goal than a plan.
Finally, it was somewhat disappointing to read in the Methdology appendix at the end of the book that adopting all of the strategies in the book doesn't actually result in a drawdown.
This isn't (just) a minor complaint. The entire ordering of solutions changes if you switch from the Plausible Scenario to the Drawdown Scenario. "Regenerative Agriculture" becomes less important, going from #11 to #14. "Tropical Forests" leap frogs over "Plant-Rich Diet" becoming more important. "Refrigeration" is no longer the #1 ranked strategy.
I understand that advocacy, especially in a contentious topic like climate change, walks a fine line between inspiring and achievable. About not wanting to be easily dismissed as out of touch, impossible, dreaming. It is still somewhat disappointing to feel a bit mislead by the title, though.
And this is something where a dynamic website is vastly more useful than a static book, if you could click on different models and see the changes update in real time and then explore.
The problem is just that all of this works much better online. So don't buy this book and instead just look at their website. (Disclaimer: I said that before looking at their website and seeing how amazingly terrible it is. Still, I stand by "this works better as a website than a book", even if they seem to be incompetent at building a website.)
Why don't I like this as a book? Let's start with the small quibbles. I read the e-book and there are several charts that are impossible to read due to small size and low quality. That's pretty common on e-books. But they include links to bigger versions! Awesome! Except four of the six links no longer work -- just three years after the book came out.
The organization is haphazard to the point of incoherence. Are the entries in alphabetical order? Nope, "Wind Turbines" comes before "Microgrids". Are they in order of ranking? Nope, "Wave and Tidal" at #29 is listed before "Concentrated Solar" at #25. Are they in some sort of thematic grouping? Not really. "Silvopasture", "Tree Intercropping", and "Multistrata Agroforestry" aren't next to one another and are instead separated by completely unrelated strategies like "Improved Rice Cultivation". The #1 strategy, "Refrigeration", comes 67% of the way into the book.
There is zero "signposting" on individual entries to help you put them into context. Open it at random to a given strategy: LED Lighting (Household). Rank: #33. Reduced CO2: 7.81 gigatons. Net cost: $323.5 billion. Net savings: $1.73 trillion. Is...that a lot? Or not much? Is that one of the more expensive strategies? Or is it really cheap? It is very easy to get lost in the details and the book's design does nothing really to help you out.
While I understand the marketing appeal of the book -- this certainly got a lot more notice than just a website would have! -- I just think it doesn't work especially well as a book and that's my single biggest complaint.
I have a few other smaller complaints. The title promises a "comprehensive plan" but there's actually no plan in the book. It is just a bunch of building blocks for a plan. This really comes out at the end of each section where they briefly explain their reasoning for the numbers they provide. It is often very unclear to me whether their model is based on "the status quo just keeps on keeping on" or massive global advocacy or something else. For instance in the section on "Tropical Forests" it states:
Using current and estimated commitments from the Bonn Challenge and New York Declaration on Forests, our model assumes that restoration could occur on 435 million acres.
So....no extra work is necessary here? We're done? Good job everyone!
Or when they talk about reducing food waste they write
After taking into account the adoption of plant-rich diets, if 50 percent of food waste is reduced by 2050, avoided emissions could be equal to 26.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide.
But...what's their actual plan to get reducing food waste by 50%? A suspiciously round number that sounds made up, by the way. More like a hope or a goal than a plan.
Finally, it was somewhat disappointing to read in the Methdology appendix at the end of the book that adopting all of the strategies in the book doesn't actually result in a drawdown.
The data shown throughout Drawdown represents the incremental impact, cost, and/or savings of an ambitious but plausible adoption of the respective solutions when compared to a thirty-year period in which growth is fixed at current levels relative to market size. [...] We call this the Plausible Scenario—an optimistic, feasible framework and forecast that models the incremental impacts of increased adoption.
[...]
Could any of these scenarios actually achieve drawdown? The Plausible Scenario would not.
This isn't (just) a minor complaint. The entire ordering of solutions changes if you switch from the Plausible Scenario to the Drawdown Scenario. "Regenerative Agriculture" becomes less important, going from #11 to #14. "Tropical Forests" leap frogs over "Plant-Rich Diet" becoming more important. "Refrigeration" is no longer the #1 ranked strategy.
I understand that advocacy, especially in a contentious topic like climate change, walks a fine line between inspiring and achievable. About not wanting to be easily dismissed as out of touch, impossible, dreaming. It is still somewhat disappointing to feel a bit mislead by the title, though.
And this is something where a dynamic website is vastly more useful than a static book, if you could click on different models and see the changes update in real time and then explore.