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The solutions are all only technical solutions – please add implementation-solutions: *how to implement* technical solutions in practice and at scale (like policy, taxes, ...) #541

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prototyperspective opened this issue Oct 27, 2022 · 1 comment

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@prototyperspective
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prototyperspective commented Oct 27, 2022

A problem with the PD approach is that you only aggregate techniques, but not ways to implement them.

Basically you aggregate, model, investigate and compare technical solutions, many of which are well-known and well-established, like (these are examples not taken from the website but for illustration):
"build renewable energy infrastructure" or "support public transport instead of cars" or "eat less meat" or "stop subsidizing fossil fuels", but not how to do so in practice and at scale and in time.


Examples of solutions on this level are:

  • different types of policy
  • taxes (like meat taxes or carbon taxes
  • personal carbon allowances
  • policy studies that investigate current and potential policies as well as policy-making on a meta-level, etc
  • making specific detailed concrete policy proposals etc (or improving the mechanisms and tools to do so and increasing the cognitive/human resources for this)
  • raising awareness, types of activism, etc
  • green job certificates (levels; these consider purpose of work, how one travels to work, way of the work, etc)
  • climate clubs of nations
  • 9€ public transport ticket
  • car-free zones, car-free days, etc
  • integration of life-cycle assessments into various processes such as subsidization, product-selection, certifications, tariffs, etc
  • eco-tariffs
  • penalizing allowing (environmentally-)harmful ads
  • running trials (and revising) of new policy, economic mechanisms, and technologies on smaller scales (beta-test-users, networks of eco-villages, smart cities, small nations)
  • standardization like requirements of energy efficiency standards for new refrigerators & similar appliances
  • types of laws
  • mobilization / shifting jobs to select industries and activities (such as renewable energy expansion or for meat-reduction)
  • creation of detailed strategy pathways and plans featuring many such specific implementation-solutions such as these
  • extensions of this list and conducting or facilitating relevant science
  • educational programs such as school reform for environmental education
  • ... (some studies can be found here; I could probably link some; some of these examples may be subordinate or parent-solutions to other implemention-solution-classes)

It's not just a problem with Project Drawdown, across the board and all of society and science, practicality/real-world-related things are severely neglected. For example, the social science about climate change mitigation is neglected and policy studies is a relatively very small field (sometimes even marginalized; see the link) with only few studies about how to implement known solutions in the real world in practice.

That shouldn't be a reason for PD to also suffer from this fallacy. That issue may be one of or the biggest barriers to effective climate change mitigation. Afaik, there currently is no comparable alternative to PD and even if there was, this layer of implemention-solutions / ways to implement solutions should not be ignored in any such platform.

There are many ways this could get added to the platform, such as adding potential (types of) ways to implement per solution or adding them under a new category of solutions (the solutions would look much different from the technical ones that are currently exclusive on the site). I don't think anybody ever (properly) aggregated (and integrated) such implementation-solutions (you wouldn't need to assess them). It's really important.

@prototyperspective prototyperspective changed the title The solutions are all only technical solutions – please add solutions on the level of *how to implement* technical solutions in practice and at scale (like policy, taxes, carbon allowances, etc) – implementation-solutions The solutions are all only technical solutions – please add implementation-solutions: *how to implement* technical solutions in practice and at scale (like policy, taxes, ...) Oct 27, 2022
@denised
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denised commented Oct 29, 2022

This is really great commentary, but beyond the current scope of the work being done by anyone currently working on/with this code repo. If you have the desire and bandwidth to start a fork, please keep us posted! I would help out as I could, and there are other volunteers who show up from time to time who would welcome some new challenges to address.

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