Structure

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming lives up to its expansive title. It is divided into eight sections: Energy, Food, Women and Girls, Buildings and Cities, Land Use, Transport, Materials, and Coming Attractions. Each section covers innovations, practices, and technology whose main goal is to create a world of equity, renewable energy and soil and atmospheric-restoration. Through the eight sections, Hawken shows that the plan covers every main avenue of life—eating, housing, mobility and education.

The book also structures each innovation into a ranking. Strategies are ranked according to their potential to reduce carbon emissions by 2050. The 80 strategies currently in use are ranked; the coming attractions are not. This means a reader can glance at the upper right hand corner of a summary and estimate where this technology falls in the scope of the other 80 current models. In some instances, the...