We should be using every bit of engineering at our disposal to ensure that Earth remains a hospitable home for humanity and for all life. The failure to do so in prior decades, in the form of irrational aversion to nuclear power, significantly exacerbated our current climate crisis. Let's not make the same mistake again.
- Monoculture farming leading to large amounts of petroleum based fertilizer being needed to fertilize crops, killing soil microorganisms, speeding soil erosion, and algae blooms in waterways
- Loss of soil microorganism diversity has harmed fungal-plant symbiosis for nutrient exchange, leading to ~40% reduction in nutritional density of the produce we eat over our lifetimes. These vegetables don't taste as good, leading more humans to have poor diets high in processed food.
- Monoculture has led to worse pest infestations with more devastating results.
How is living carbon going to implement this plan in a way that creates a diverse ecosystem of trees (and symbiotic plants, fungi and bacteria) rather than a monoculture?
Are there seedlings all clones? How many genotypes will go into a single tree farm? (I predict cost of developing unique genotypes will lead to them only putting 1 or <10 distinct genotypes into their initial treefarms, so genetic diversity will be low)
How will the intended rot resistance effect fungal biodiversity in forests where these trees grow? Does it last 1 year, 10 years, or 100? How long will a forest of dry twigs be able to avoid a fire (and release all of its carbon regardless)?
Climate change appears to be the most urgent path to apocalypse, but its not the only path. If these trees end up in our national forests, outcompete the existing trees and kill off the soil biodiversity, then a pest kills off all of these inbred trees - we could end up worse off than we started.
There are absolutely failure modes to be concerned about, and their planned Jurassic Park style reproduction controls makes me worried there could be Jurassic Park style outcomes.
Given the parallel efforts being made for bioengineered mycoremediation (which is far more likely to "escape"), I suspect that the rot-resistance effect will be fairly temporary, and the long term net effect will just be enhanced long-term biosequestration of metals in the soil that will benefit the ecosystem.
It would be pretty important not to engineer trees that are significant food sources for anything too high up the food chain, or at least somehow ensure that the metal accumulation only happens in the relatively inedible parts (like wood), but otherwise at first glance this seems a viable stopgap to damp the carbon release feedback loops that are staring us in the face.
I'm wondering if rot resistance (perhaps of other sorts than metal accumulation) can be useful in other contexts.
For example, here in New Mexico we're experiencing a decimation of the piñon pine trees that provide pine nuts (commercially) and ecological niches for a variety of birds. The warmer winters aren't killing off the bark beetles as they used to so the beetles are killing off the trees, especially when they're stressed from drought, and the alternatives seem to be somehow making the trees less appetizing to the beetles, introducing something to eat the beetles, or else just migrating the forests north into Colorado.
> dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering.
and
> the technical plant wizardry that prevented the starvation of millions of people.
What exactly are you referring to? In my mind, crop domestication and selective breeding is what allowed population growth, not what prevented starvation. In other words, population grew thanks to the increase in production, rather than the increase coming to combat decline. Was that a wrong notion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
"Norman Borlaug [...] is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation"
Says so right on the wikipedia dot org web site you showed the link to:
>It was associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization.
Bioengineering to convert petroleum products into something people could eat. Really, preventing famine and causing populations to increase are the same thing. A food surplus lets populations grow, a food shortage causes famine.
Not through "breeding and engineering", through artificial nitrogen fertilizer. We have been turning oil into people.
> prevented the starvation of millions of people.
That delayed the starvation of millions of people and now we are facing the prospect of the starvation of billions of people.
FWIW, I do applauded Maddie and her team, and I wish them luck and hope they succeed. But the only way we are going to avert disaster is to stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. That's it.
Here's a fascinating talk by Václav Smil at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019, where he makes the point better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk
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edit: i'm rate limited at the moment. Replying to HWR_14 below
Dwarf wheat was generated through selective breeding, same as the last N-thousand years. And it was only necessary due to the defects of using artificial nitrogen fertilizer:
> Taller wheat grasses better compete for sunlight, but tend to collapse under the weight of the extra grain—a trait called lodging—from the rapid growth spurts induced by nitrogen fertilizer Borlaug used in the poor soil. To prevent this, he bred wheat to favor shorter, stronger stalks that could better support larger seed heads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Dwarfing
Anyway, my point isn't that science doesn't work or isn't good, it's that engineering trees to fix the climate is a whiffle.
And one could take that argument a step further, by saying that instead of being forced to learn how to stabilize our population growth at a level the planet could support, these bio-engineering advances enabled our population to continue to grow at an unsustainable rate until it is now, potentially, beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Meaning they may well have saved millions from starvation at the time - but could now contribute to the deaths of billions, the extinction of millions of species, and the collapse of the overall biosphere.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm open to engineering (both through traditional breeding and through modern genetic methods) as a part of the solution. But this writing off of concerns about it by pointing to past successes is absurd. We're talking about an extremely complex systems problem - the fact that our eagerness to grow our own numbers and control our environment has now caused us to push our planet's ecosystems to the brink of collapse - and that means we need to be extremely careful about how we go about solving it.
And the safest solution is to rollback - not try to roll forward. Yes, it happens to be the one that has the highest cost for us in terms of changes to our way of life, but arguably it could lead to a much better (saner, healthier) way of life.
But it also means a lot of people with power need to give up that power. And a lot of people who want the freedom to move fast and break shit with out having to think through the consequences will be forced to slow down and consider those consequences before they get to break shit.
Breeding is included in the genetic engineering definition?
the starvation of billions of people is not at stake
your certainty about the "only way" to resolve things is idiotic and reductionist
There seems to be a logical mistake. Food production is not primarily to fight starvation. Because of the increase in available food millions of new people exist. Without it they wouldn’t have existed hence not starved either. Humans, just like animals, adapt to their surroundings. With more available food the populations grows, with less it shrinks.
But as much as people fantasize about native plants completely unaltered from their natural state, the ability to dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering.
We now face a similar challenge to stave off disaster, and efforts to create improvements to existing species to accomplish it deserve the same applause as the technical plant wizardry that prevented the starvation of millions of people.
Much as the plant revolution primarily benefited the world's hungry poor, mitigating climate change also primarily benefits the world's poor, much of whom live in hot tropical climates most susceptible to wet bulb temp hazards. So it's bizarre to see so many wealthy people in this forum complain about the use of technology to achieve a goal that will be so important to prevent the deaths of so many: but I suppose it makes sense, because like eating only low yielding native foods, ignoring climate change and making fun of attempts to solve it is a privilege of wealthy folk who are best able to compensate for it with air conditioning and mobility, and whose kids and grandkids will not have to pay the price.
Living Carbon's technical methods should be scrutinized and the business model questioned, but Maddie and her team should be applauded, and the Whole Foods crowd with vague, unspecific negative thoughts should at least recognize how much luxury they have to rag on humans' attempt to use plants to better our world.