Thanks—leaving aside the debate on whether nuclear power is unfairly underrated by Drawdown, I’d certainly agree with some of the criticisms. It’s a great opening list of ideas, but it excludes unproven solutions which rules out obviously essential solutions like carbon capture and storage. They do not give a cost effectiveness ranking to the solutions and tractability doesn’t seem to be a major consideration (from listening to the podcast they have clearly considered this, but not in the depth that EA folk would probably like). Really it’s these criticisms that I’d like to start an EA project to address. I view their work as very helpful starting place, and given the scale of the task of evaluating hundreds of different solutions in depth I have plenty of respect for what they’ve done.
Thanks—leaving aside the debate on whether nuclear power is unfairly underrated by Drawdown, I’d certainly agree with some of the criticisms. It’s a great opening list of ideas, but it excludes unproven solutions which rules out obviously essential solutions like carbon capture and storage. They do not give a cost effectiveness ranking to the solutions and tractability doesn’t seem to be a major consideration (from listening to the podcast they have clearly considered this, but not in the depth that EA folk would probably like). Really it’s these criticisms that I’d like to start an EA project to address. I view their work as very helpful starting place, and given the scale of the task of evaluating hundreds of different solutions in depth I have plenty of respect for what they’ve done.