I Read Drawdown, 100 Ways to Reverse Global Warming, and Share My Thoughts

2021-12-06 original Science

DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

I organized the contents of Drawdown into notes across several posts.

What genuinely deserves admiration, I think, is how many issues remain and how many different countries are already working on various initiatives.

I once worked on a project to collect air pollution data, and at the time it was hard to find anyone in the US or Japan who understood what I was doing.

That’s a thing of the past now.

I’m deeply encouraged to learn that people all over the world were working on this kind of thing even back when I was doing it — in fact, long before I was doing it.

So why was there such a large perception gap?

At the time, I often heard comments like: “America has clean air and plenty of land, so nobody there feels this is a problem” → true, actually “The environment doesn’t make money” → true, actually

Both of these are indeed true.

And yet the WHO and the EPA alike keep sounding the alarm about rising death tolls from air pollution, and severe air pollution damage in India and China gets reported almost every month. Yet people remain indifferent. For many people around the world, environmental problems still haven’t become something they see as their own. Someone might donate $10 to famine relief in Africa, but they wouldn’t go to the actual site to provide hands-on support, and it would never occur to them to invest millions of dollars to back a project — that’s roughly the level we’re talking about.

Historically, too, the environment has been treated as a “commons” placed outside the market economy. Whether you improve it or degrade it, there’s no direct economic rationale either way. Bluntly put, people acted on it if there was regulation and didn’t if there wasn’t.

But in recent years this has been shifting significantly. Specifically, through the introduction of carbon taxes, and further, through the advance of carbon credit markets.

The environment is now being pulled into the economy. Some people probably view this negatively.

The Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, active in the first half of the 20th century, identified “labor,” “land,” and “money” as “fictitious commodities” and argued that these should not be fully commodified under capitalism. He argued these should only ever be traded under various political constraints and controls, not purely according to economic rationality.

From a Polanyi-like perspective, what about “the environment”? The commodification of land, for instance, has led to extreme urbanization, a problem common across developed countries. It became the root cause of bubbles not just in Japan but in many countries. This is exactly what Polanyi pointed to.

But carbon credit markets have been drawing attention in Europe, Oceania, South America, and elsewhere, and I understand this as an attempt to realign the world’s balance of power by creating a new financial market.

Everyone now understands that the era when you could solve everything by aggressively extracting fossil fuels and exploiting the Global South through mass production and mass consumption is completely over. Carbon credits can be understood as one attempt to sketch out the picture of the society that comes next. Personally, I see them functioning rather skillfully as a strategy to drag the people mentioned above — the ones who can’t see this as their own issue — willy-nilly to a shared table.

Right now we’re in a period where private carbon credit markets are running rampant. Whether a platform emerges to manage this in an integrated way, and who ends up controlling it, will determine whether the commodification of the environment succeeds or fails.

I’ve digressed a bit, but beyond what I’ve described above, the surrounding conditions for environmental measures and environmental business are falling into place from many angles. Against that backdrop, Drawdown was packed with ideas about what issues remain where, and how to think about gauging their impact.

The section that struck me hardest was “Agriculture.” There are several points to make, but they can broadly be summarized as the following two:

・Technical integration hasn’t progressed sufficiently ・It’s unclear which countries are technically advanced

First, on technical integration. For many items, there doesn’t seem to be sufficient global agreement on what the right answer is.

For example, the author says it’s known that regenerative agriculture and environmentally restorative farming outperform conventional farming methods both in environmental impact and cost-effectiveness. And yet efforts to switch over to these methods look far too sporadic.

In another example, another book noted that agroforestry has been common in Australia since the 1980s. It spread thanks to government policy recommendations as well as favorable conditions like vast tracts of land. I don’t think you see that kind of scene in Japan. It’s still the old pattern: “fields are fields,” “paddies are paddies,” “pasture is pasture,” “forest is forest.”

The book also described several promising approaches to weed management, but none of them appear in what you’d call standard agricultural textbooks — meaning it seems almost none of them are actually adopted in the field.

Japanese books on “natural farming” describe approaches nearly identical to these. The same goes for the sections on microbial symbiosis and the negative effects of fertilizer on it, similar to what I noted in the section on the Wood Wide Web. Many researchers realized this long ago.

And yet Professor Nakajima of Tsukuba University wrote in his book that the challenge is that the technical methodology hasn’t been sufficiently established.

In other words, this remains something happening between researchers and a handful of collaborators in agriculture, while many for-profit companies still can’t escape the trap of mass production and mass consumption through heavy inputs of fertilizer and pesticides.

That’s still far from the ideal of low input, circulation, and coexistence with nature.

Next, on which countries are technically advanced.

As I wrote in the section on the Burkina Faso case, methods developed by local residents and suited to their own locality often prove effective. Another book described a method called nature-symbiotic farming, where in the first year you simply scatter whatever seeds you happen to have. Whatever grows well is judged to suit that land, and from the following year on, you carefully think through how to combine those crops via crop rotation and multi-cropping; after that, a natural cycle emerges without much further intervention. Organic farming, by contrast, draws criticism for constantly adjusting the soil to suit organic methods, which raises costs, since you have to keep doing it to maintain the effect.

From the standpoint of “everyday food,” the cost that can be put into agriculture is never large. That’s obvious if you look at the prices of vegetables lined up in supermarkets. The market economy has resolved this through the logic of scale. It’s an approach extremely familiar to us: producing in bulk to make things cheap. This became reality through the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which revolutionized nitrogen fertilizer, and through the history of pesticide improvements. But needless to say, concerns have arisen in recent years about the environmental burden and soil sustainability these bring.

If something turns out to be wrong, we should turn back and look for a different path.

Developed countries already know the answer. That said — where exactly are “developed countries,” again? At this turning point in history, there’s a good chance that many lessons are hidden in economically less developed countries.

What makes agriculture extremely tricky is that you have to farm in a way suited to each land’s particular characteristics, and resisting that gets you nowhere. Knowing the land is critically important.

The following is purely my own personal hypothesis, but I think there’s still a great deal technology can contribute on this point.

Naturally, when clearing farmland, the soil gets tested. I imagine detailed studies are done, including boring surveys that look underground. But these only capture fragments cut out of time and space. That’s the problem. Testing multiple locations is costly, and testing over a wide area is also costly. So the data you get is extremely coarse in time resolution, and the spatial resolution is far from adequate either. Improving this would raise the precision of template-style choices like “this kind of land calls for this kind of method,” and integrating soil data and harvest data across many sites would also expand the variations of the templates themselves.

There do seem to be private-sector attempts at this kind of data integration, but it looked like you’d have to pay a fair amount just to become a member, so I gave up on it. Why can’t this be done on an open platform?

There’s still a great deal IoT can do for agriculture. I’m convinced of that. That said, various people have already tried this, so we need to watch closely for why it hasn’t worked.

Now, shifting perspective a bit — the energy sector was closer to my own expertise and easier to understand, but it felt somewhat saturated. I mean that in a purely positive sense.

For each type of power generation, the technical advantages and generation efficiency are now largely understood, and it’s fully at the practical-use stage. Conversely, the generation methods that have been attempted for years but still haven’t gotten there didn’t seem to me to have much of a bright future. All the cards are already on the table, and we’ve reached the phase of “so now, what do we do with them?”

That means grid-related technology will only grow more important.

Each renewable energy method has its own drawbacks precisely because it follows nature, which inevitably calls for a dynamic system to optimally compensate for them. This is undoubtedly a grand and difficult undertaking, but honestly I don’t see much in the way of technical limits or constraints; it’s not really a field that demands a groundbreaking innovation. I can picture it being achieved through steady, incremental accumulation.

What’s more likely to become a problem, I think, is the political removal of vested interests tied to fossil fuels and nuclear power. These interests have survived on the excuse that “renewable energy still isn’t good enough,” but everyone understands that excuse won’t hold much longer. Vested interests also involve not just capital owners but the employees who depend on them. The more we move toward low-cost, easy-to-maintain energy, and the more AI use reduces operating costs, the sharper the conflict with these vested interests will become.

I have no expertise in nature conservation, so my reaction was mostly “hmm, I learned a lot” — but the section on ocean permaculture genuinely gave me chills. It struck me as an idea of tremendous creativity.

The idea of planting forests in the ocean is, I think, a genuinely good one. It would photosynthesize, plankton would probably increase, and fish would probably increase too.

That much is fine on its own, but then: using tidal and wave power to pull up cold water from the deep sea, triggering vertical mixing, and keeping the surface from overheating. Kelp sinks to the seafloor while still holding its carbon. Combine this with ocean circulation patterns and design the placement well, and you could sequester carbon on a scale of thousands of years — this part is my own view.

It needs no energy input, and since no energy needs to be recovered, it can be done anywhere. I was overwhelmed by the coherence and scale of the whole logic.

Honestly, I could keep writing indefinitely, but I’ll stop here for now. The field of the environment overflows with great possibility and great necessity.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/12/826/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.