A world-renowned environmental scientist, sustainability expert, author, and public speaker, Jon spearheads Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. His work focuses on understanding our changing planet and finding new solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources we all depend on. Jon’s groundbreaking research and insights have led him to become a trusted advisor to governments, foundations, NGOs, and business leaders around the world. He and his colleagues have made major contributions to our understanding of global ecosystems, food security and the environment, climate change, and the sustainability of the world’s resources. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including many highly cited works in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is among the top 1 percent most cited global scientists.
In the foreword to the book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, you wrote, “The climate change narrative has become a doom and gloom story causing people to experience denial, anger, or resignation. At times, I’ve been one of those people… Thanks to Drawdown, I have a different perspective… Drawdown has helped restore my faith in the future and in the capacity of human beings to solve incredible challenges.” How has your involvement in Project Drawdown changed your perspective?
I don’t know how you can be awake and alive in the 21st century and not be sometimes very depressed about the direction we seem to be taking. At the same time, how can you not help but be completely exhilarated by the incredible opportunities, people, and solutions that are abundantly around us?
We are living in a time of contradictions. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That seems to be a repeating pattern of history, where we face a choice about which world we will build: one that gets worse or one that gets better. The question of one’s time in history is, “Which path do you choose and work for?”
That kind of tension between two very different worlds is the moment we all live in, and if you aren’t aware of both of them, I think you’re missing the story. I encourage people to have a really hard-eyed, factual look at the state of the world. When you do that and take inventory, you find there are a lot of problems, and at any given moment, there are also a lot of opportunities. Usually, when I count them up, the opportunities still outnumber the problems. Our job is to expand on those opportunities, to scale them into real solutions and to encourage others to do the same.
That doesn’t mean we just forget that we have the problems or deny that they feel overwhelming and cause grief and anxiety. But we must have the dogged determinism to say, “Yes, we absolutely have problems, but we also have great opportunities and solutions staring us in the face. Let’s work on those.” That doesn’t mean that the problems don’t feel overwhelming and cause grief and anxiety. Of course they do. But if we look at it right, and see the incredible people we meet every day, the incredible solutions that are becoming available, and the incredible magnificence and awe of the natural world… if you aren’t feeling at least a little bit inspired every day, you need to get your glasses fixed. There is so much beauty, awe, and magnificence in the natural world to be inspired by and to emulate. How can we not see that?
In the environmental community, we often fall into only the problem side of the conversation without remembering the other side of the story, which is that we have the most opportunities of any humans in history. So many young people and people who call themselves “doomers” say, “Just screw it. We’re done. Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket.” Really? I think anybody in your family history would like to say, “Hold my beer.” You think you have it hard? You think this is the worst time in human history? Let me tell you about the Great Depression and fighting fascism around the world…or about when this country actually went to Civil War. Think about every generation prior to ours, and the incredible challenges they faced. They still got up every day and many of them made great sacrifices and did incredible work so that the next generation could live a better life.
It is certainly not the time to run up the white flag. And how dare we? How dare we give up, in light of the tremendous suffering of people in the world who are facing things that many of us could not really imagine. How dare we give up on future generations we’ve never met and say, “Nah, we were too depressed to bother.” How dare we look at our ancestors and say, “Yes, you fought hard and sacrificed so that I could have a chance to build a better world, but I didn’t bother.” We’ve been given so many gifts by previous generations, and we owe it to them and to all the people that will come after us to at least do our best. I’d hate to be the first generation that not only didn’t give the next generation a better world than we inherited, but didn’t even try. I don’t want to be that generation.
I don’t either.
Nobody does. But we might be that if we don’t get off our asses a little bit.
Well, let’s talk about getting off of our asses and embracing the opportunities and solutions. In the years that have passed since Drawdown was published, have the solutions and the ranking of those solutions changed in any significant and surprising ways?
The book was just the first salvo in that conversation, and it was the first time the world put together what was actually available and crunched some numbers on them to show that when you put together all of the solutions that were known at the time, and there are many more now, did we stand a chance of stopping climate change? Was this a laughable pittance compared to the size of the problem or were the solutions at least commensurate with the size of the problem?
What we learned is that the solutions we have right now are already basically enough to address climate change if we do all of them… and that in the process, we’ll build a far better world. For example, the air pollution linked to fossil fuels (not just the greenhouse gases, but the smog and particulate matter) currently kills nine million people a year around the world. That’s more than tobacco, guns, and warfare combined. So not only can we solve a climate problem, we can solve one of the biggest health problems in the world too, and a tremendous inequity because most people dying from this are poor and in marginalized communities.
So you have a big win not only to the economy, to health and to security and to the national order and international order of stability and peace. It’s kind of like going to the doctor, the doctor saying, “Whoa, you’re really sick, but I’ve got a cure for your illness that not only gets rid of the disease, it’s going to make you healthier and wealthier and better looking. When have you ever heard that?
That’s the beautiful thing about climate solutions: they not only try to address a big problem; they also benefit the world in so many other columns that it would be stupid not to implement them. So Drawdown has been learning more and more—not only about the individual solutions, but also the benefits they afford the world. We’ve also been learning a lot more about how to not just talk about solutions but how to better deploy them. It’s not enough to give people a list of ingredients, you got to teach people how to cook. It’s the difference between a book about food, to a cookbook. We have to go from solutions to strategies as well, so that’s what a lot of our more recent work has been focusing on.
Our readers are likely very familiar with the concept of co-benefits because they see them in the work they do. Can you also talk about the cumulative nature of the benefits of solutions and the importance of time?
The climate problem is a cumulative property of the planet. The temperatures we are seeing on Earth this year aren’t because of the emissions we put in the atmosphere this year; they are the result of hundreds of years of emissions piling up in the atmosphere, thickening the greenhouse gas blanket of the planet, and warming the atmosphere. Climate solutions need to chip away at a long, cumulative property of the atmosphere, too. Just as climate pollution adds up over time, climate solutions also add up over time and the time factor is the most important. At Drawdown, we often say, “time is more important than tech,” and “now is better than new.”
We might admire the enthusiasm of the Bill Gates type folks, but their ideas are often misplaced because the solutions they tend to focus on are in the more high-tech thinking areas. While I welcome that work, the solutions arrive too late, or they never show up. I don’t mind somebody funding some R&D in a lab somewhere, because who knows what new discoveries will take place. That’s a million dollar problem. But when you talk about billions of dollars or trillions of dollars, you’ve got to put the money where it works best and you’ve got to put it in real solutions, not science fiction. I get a little depressed when I see the government subsidizing stupid projects that use some technology to try to remove CO2 from the atmosphere when trees do it perfectly well. The problem with trees in nature is that it’s not permanent unless we guarantee those landscapes stay intact in the future, which we need to work on. But there are also lots of ways we can take natural carbon and lock it up even longer, whether it’s things like biochar or biocoal, bio-oils, or long-lived biological materials and lumber, wood products, and other materials.
Throwing billions of dollars at high-tech solutions that might arrive in 50 years but probably won’t is not just a waste of money; it’s a waste of time, which is way more important, and a waste of attention, which is probably most important, as it distracts us from the things we could be doing that actually move the needle now.
In financial investing, you are investing in the future, and there is a time value of money. Similarly, we’ve coined the phrase kind of a “time value of carbon,” that early investments pay off in the long run. Saving a gigaton per year starting today for the next 25 years has a pretty big impact. But waiting until 2049 to turn on a solution that gives you one gigaton per year only gives you one. I can get 25 times more if I start today with something simple. So why wouldn’t you want to do that?
We often talk about “emergency brake-style solutions” for climate, the ones that are available today that are big, fast, and cheap. Some of those include things that your readers care a lot about, like preventing deforestation. Reforestation takes time—decades for that carbon to come back—but preventing it from being burned in the first place has all the benefits today. You get all the benefits of that solution on day one (actually day zero, because it never even went in the atmosphere, so it’s immediate.)
Ecological restoration is very important, but preventing ecological destruction is even more important because you get all the benefits on day one.
I do want to ask about your perspective on the solutions that fall into the “land use” category. How important do you think they are? And can you offer any words of encouragement to the people involved in those who may be worried now about funding or repercussions from the recent election?
Solutions that are focused on land and oceans are immensely important. I would argue that land use, especially from agriculture, is the biggest hammer we’re hitting this planet with bar none—bigger than fossil fuels even overall. About a quarter to a third of the climate problem comes from the food system. Most of that’s in deforestation, methane, and nitrous oxide from fertilizer.
Land use, especially related to agriculture, is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss in the world, and the biggest driver of water use and water pollution in the world. So I look at the global food system and say, “Oh my God, this is even a bigger challenge than fossil fuels are.” Yet with the climate problem, sometimes we focus only on fossil fuels and renewable energy. I think that’s a mistake. At least a quarter to a third of the climate problem alone is related to food and land use, so we desperately need to address that.
But we have to put the work where it’s needed most, and stopping destruction is the job number one today. In parallel, it’s also trying to restore what we can by rewilding or using regenerative agriculture techniques. Those are all really, really important.
There’s a lot of great work in the regenerative agriculture community, but because the term is still very vague and has no real very precise definition or standard yet, I do worry that at times, especially in regenerative grazing, it is used to greenwash what’s actually a pretty bad industry.
So you feel like the term “regenerative agriculture” has been hijacked?
I definitely think so. While it’s a wonderful notion which I wholeheartedly philosophically love, the term “regenerative” has become a co-opted greenwashing term by at least the beef and dairy industries. They are just outright lies that we have to call out. Regenerative beef is only a partial climate solution if we’re also shrinking herds. If we’re trying to maintain U.S. levels of beef production at their current absurdly high levels and absurdly high levels of waste (40% of the beef we grow is never even eaten) and some people are eating way too much for any health or nutritional benefit) and just trying to greenwash it by calling it regenerative and putting the cows on grass, it turns out they’re going to need more time, and more land, and they’re going to produce more greenhouse gases compared to feedlot beef, which is already bad enough. We don’t have enough land in America. We’d have to annex part of Canada to graze that much cattle. Seriously. Not only is there not enough grassland in America, there’s not enough America in America to do it.
When we talk about land use and climate and all these things, there’s a lot of work to be done, and we just have to be very clear-eyed about what really works and what’s a bit of distraction, because we can’t afford those anymore. We have to get down to what actually works.
What we found is that stopping deforestation, shifting our diets, and reducing food waste are among the biggest solutions. They’re always in the top two or three or four kind of climate solutions, no matter how we put together the scenarios, because there’s just such a gigantic food system out there that’s using so much land and so many resources and produces so much greenhouse gas, how could we not make it more efficient?
Do you have any words of encouragement for people who are actively conserving and restoring natural systems, and thoughtfully integrating them into the built environment.
It has never been a more important time to be good at what they do right now. I think that the combination of craft and science that is in this community is tremendous and has never been more valuable. I hope people are feeling the urgency and the encouragement to keep doing the great work that they’re doing.
While it can be depressing to look at the national or international politics of some of these things, I would encourage people not to get too distracted by that. Yes, it matters, but it only matters so much. What you do matters too. What happens in every town and every city, county, and state around the country and around the world is actually more important than what happens in Washington. Don’t get too distracted by the politicians and media outlets that are trying to distract and divide us. People are making billions of dollars of scaring and polarizing us right now, whether it’s cable news, social media, or our political leaders or activist. They want us to have all of our eyes glued to the TV or our phones, worrying about the Beltway nonsense going on today. We definitely need to pay attention to that but… go for a walk. Go get your hands dirty. Let’s go actually do something in the real world. That’s a good antidote to all the crazy stuff we see on our phones.
When we think of all the levers that change the world, whoever thought that the White House or the U.S. House of Representatives was ever going to save us anyway? If you really ever betted on the UN, the White House, or Congress to save your ass, you were probably being a little foolish to begin with. Even with the best elected leaders, why abdicate that power or responsibility to a bunch of politicians anyway? Even in the best of times, that seems like it is probably not the best bet.
But I would bet on our neighbors, our communities, and our tremendously innovative thinkers in this country and beyond, to be the real leaders of the world. That’s what keeps me hopeful. I see a lot of wonderful activity happening out there, and that we are beginning to bend the curve on some really important things. We’re making some tremendous progress. Don’t lose sight of that. One of your players in the team got injured this quarter, then you’ve got to adapt to how you play and still try to get a goal. The federal election matters, but it’s not the only thing.
Where else do you the hope and courage to keep doing what you do?
Rebecca Solnit wrote a book years ago called Hope in the Dark, and I think it is very relevant today. She is a brilliant writer and thinker, and she reminds us in that book that hope is a verb, not a noun. It isn’t a passive thing that you just have or turn on and off; it’s an act. It’s something you must do.
People with hope aren’t just people with blind optimism. Optimists are people who just believe somehow it’ll magically turn out okay. The invisible hands of the market or technology will take care of it. Hope is your hands, people with dirt under their fingernails. People who get up every day and try to get something done, knowing that they may actually fail, but not giving up. Hope is an act of love, of compassion, of belief in the possibility of a better future. That’s what has changed the world every single time: people acting through love and hope.
