
Ten of the strategies could only be accomplished by large conservative multinational corporations, mostly energy and utility companies, and each strategy was underwater financially. I read the plan and did some calculations. Each wedge reduced global carbon emissions by one billion tons a year.

Later that same year, 2001, the Carbon Mitigation Initiative published fifteen climate strategies, eight of which could create global wedges, a method to stabilize emissions for the next fifty years. I had been schooled in climate change in the early 1970s by Peter Schwartz at Stanford Research Institute, and I continued to read and be informed. Project Drawdown started sixteen years ago when the Third Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was issued. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story. The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. I took him at his word, and I’ve devoted my life to learning about the world. He taught at a university but told me that my education began when I left school.

I think it was my father who set me on my path. I have had a many careers while always being a writer and journalist. Paul Hawken: Basically, I was a curious boy who grew up but never lost his curiosity. I spoke with Hawken about the origins of Project Drawdown, the influence he hopes Drawdown has on readers, and the ways in which readers can get further involved in the work that Project Drawdown is doing.Īmy Brady: Tell us about yourself and how you got involved with Project Drawdown. The result of their research is Drawdown, an immensely readable volume of solutions to climate change written for laypeople but informed by the world’s top experts in the field – the first book of its kind. Thankfully, editor Paul Hawken and a coalition of more than two hundred scientists, researchers, fellows, writers, economists, financial analysts, architects, companies, agencies, NGOs, activists, and other experts have formed Project Drawdown to gather one hundred of the most viable ways to “draw down” carbon from the atmosphere. President Trump’s top advisors are split on whether to exit the Agreement, and 2016 clocked in as the hottest year ever on record.

In early 2016, national leaders from around the world began signing the Paris Agreement. In 2015, 195 nations agreed at a meeting in Paris to take measures to reduce carbon emissions.
