Drawdown Science

The planet is now more than 1.1°C warmer than before the Industrial Revolution—and it shows. This summer, we’ve experienced punishing heat waves, devastating floods, and toxic levels of wildfire smoke filling our skies. As temperatures climb, the risk of extreme weather rises, too. And we’re facing an even hotter, more dangerous future. Humans are conducting an unprecedented experiment on the entire planet, and no one is sure exactly how bad it will turn out. But there is hope. Most of the solutions we need to stop climate change and avoid the worst-case scenarios are already here. Join Kate Marvel, senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown, as she draws on her own experiences as a scientist and vocal advocate for climate solutions to explore the science behind current climate changes and future projections. In this webinar recording, Marvel discusses in easy-to-grasp terms the science of attributing extreme weather events to our warming climate, the different ways humans affect climate, and the things science doesn’t yet understand. This webinar is part of Project Drawdown’s new monthly Drawdown Ignite webinar series. Drawdown Ignite provides information and inspiration to guide your climate solutions journey. Updates on future webinars can be found by visiting drawdown.org/events  

A roadmap is an incredibly useful tool for getting from one place to another. It shows you where you’re heading and the various routes to get there. Even more useful, however, is a customized version – a roadmap that shows in detail which route to take if you want to get from where YOU are to YOUR destination in the most efficient way possible, given the resources (time, money, transportation options) available. Similarly, the Drawdown Roadmap is invaluable for showing in a general way how we can achieve a climate-stable future. But it doesn’t necessarily lay out the best path for those focusing on a specific sector, such as electricity, industry, transportation, buildings, or food, agriculture, and land use. Enter Drawdown Roadmaps – with an “s.”  Where the Drawdown Roadmap describes how to strategically mobilize solutions across sectors, time, and place; engage the power of co-benefits; and recognize and remove obstacles, Drawdown Roadmaps will offer specific recommendations customized to solutions or solutions categories, allowing companies, philanthropies, investors, development banks, and policymakers to select the route that best fits their circumstances. First up, in the early part of 2024, will be a Drawdown Roadmap for Food, Agriculture, and Land Use. This tool will apply the Roadmap framework to food systems to identify “emergency brake” solutions that will lead to rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It will highlight which solutions can be implemented quickly and have the biggest bang-for-the-buck in specific regions around the world. Other areas of focus we’re hoping to develop as funding allows include buildings and win-wins for nature and climate. For each customized roadmap, reports, infographics, fact sheets, videos, and map layers will allow users to align considerations such as suitability, feasibility, impact, and co-benefits to identify the best path forward under their unique circumstances.  Eventually – again, as funding allows – we hope to produce interactive web-based apps that enable users to design a roadmap around their specific circumstances to help their company or organization reduce their emissions quickly. We’ll share more as our work develops.  Do you have suggestions for specific Roadmaps that might be of most use to you and your colleagues? Interested in helping to fund the Roadmaps initiative? Please let us know at information@drawdown.org.

The Biden Administration is backing industrial carbon capture schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Big Oil – bolstering their bottom lines and extending a PR lifeline that ensures they can continue polluting – all under the guise of climate action. Record heat waves. Widespread fires. Devastating storms. The tragic toll of climate change is becoming more evident every day. To avoid even more severe impacts in the future, we must quickly and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions – largely caused by fossil fuels. Fortunately, the tools we need to cut emissions through energy efficiency, renewable energy, and beyond are growing quickly, becoming better and more affordable over time. We will also need some “carbon removal” in the future – where we use nature (with trees or soils) or industrial processes to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, sequester it, and keep it from adding to our climate woes. In the last few years, more attention has focused on industrial methods, because they can bury carbon in permanent, geologic reservoirs, unlike trees and soils that can burn down or be plowed up. In principle, this makes sense. But in practice, industrial carbon removal is wildly expensive, far too energy- and resource-intensive, and only removes pathetically small amounts of carbon. It’s nowhere near being a viable solution to climate change. For the foreseeable future, cutting emissions is the most feasible means of addressing climate change. And whatever carbon removal we might eventually develop should only be used to address the final, hard-to-abate emissions left after fossil fuels are phased out. Most of all, carbon removal should never be used as a substitute for cutting emissions, or to help delay phasing out fossil fuels. So why is the federal government doing exactly the opposite – putting big money behind dubious carbon capture projects, in ways that specifically benefit Big Oil and help delay climate action? Last week Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced $1.2 billion in new funding for “Direct Air Capture” projects, including a giant project led by Occidental Petroleum. Unbelievably, we will be giving tax dollars to an oil company – as Big Oil makes record profits – to try to mop up some of the pollution they created. And this is only part of a $3.5 billion DOE commitment to Direct Air Capture projects, and a much larger portfolio of government funding and tax breaks that reads like a love letter to the fossil fuel industry. (This is on top of the estimated $20 billion in other annual subsidies the government already gives Big Oil.) But this isn’t new. Previous administrations also funded Big Oil’s industrial carbon capture schemes, including ridiculous “Clean Coal” and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) projects that claimed they would reduce carbon pollution from fossil power plants. Of course, the projects flopped and wasted billions of tax dollars – even prompting a rebuke from the Government Accountability Office. While these projects were spectacular failures – financially, technologically, and operationally – they did serve one powerful purpose: They provided a fig leaf to the fossil fuel industry. These projects distracted the world with greenwash and helped delay policies intended to phase out dirty fuels. And that’s exactly what they were intended to do. Now, the Biden Administration is repeating this move. But it’s a mistake, for six big reasons. First, industrial carbon capture is still far too clunky and expensive – costing thousands of dollars per ton – to put on the taxpayer’s dime. By comparison, cutting emissions through energy efficiency or renewable energy is far cheaper, and saves taxpayers money in the long run. Instead of billion-dollar Big Oil boondoggles, the government should invest in proven climate solutions while funding smaller, more innovative R&D projects that explore cheaper, scalable ways to capture carbon. Second, industrial carbon removal is comically undersized. Even the largest projects only sequester seconds worth of our annual emissions, at tremendous expense. And no meaningful scaling of this technology – to a size needed to help address climate change – is in sight. Basic physics, and common sense, tells us this is exceptionally challenging.