Ugh, I want to be positive about this, I really do, but I just seems wrong to me on so many levels.
We didn't even understand basic things about trees till like a few decades ago leading to stupidly counterproductive practices like spraying glyphosate all over public lands to create 'free to grow' tree plantations on what used to be forests.
All of this is done by forestry companies on public land.
If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
The fact that they aren't using this adaptation (or some other one) means that probably photosynthesis speed is already being traded off against some other factor in their communities (they form relationships with other species which we barely understand).
Edit: About those free to grow plantations? It turns out that they were trying to get rid of Alder which they thought was competing with Spruce. It turns out that the Alder were feeding the Spruce seedlings instead.
"The fact that they aren't using this adaptation (or some other one) means that probably photosynthesis speed is already being traded off against some other factor in their communities"
What's best for the tree might not be best for us. Human civilization is in a time and resource crunch. This isn't about making better trees for trees sake, this is about solving the immediate problem of too much carbon in the atmosphere.
I'll give you though, that once we solve this carbon problem it's possible we might have another problem. So hopefully we keep a backup of some of these "heritage" trees.
Isn't that one of the main concerns here? I wouldn't call it solving the carbon problem, but bandaging it. If we're lucky we don't make it worse long-term, if we're not, we may be in much more trouble later.
Of course we humans should exploit as much as possible without giving a damn about anything else, including our own future generations.
Trees have proven incredibly adept at restabilizing the climate over eons. However, to continue to sustainably inhabit the earth as a species, we need to address the imbalance of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions over the scale of a human lifetime.
We’ve developed a photosynthesis enhancement trait to increase plants’ growth rate and carbon sequestration potential. Some plants have naturally developed a similar method of photosynthesis efficiency increase, known as C4 photosynthesis, which relies on anatomical changes that are only possible in a certain group of plants. Our method achieves similar carbon capture results without requiring elaborate anatomical changes. This is incredibly different from developing an organism that is resistant to glyphosate.
Additionally, while trees sequester an enormous amount of carbon, they also release it back into the air through decomposition. We are developing a range of tree species, with characteristics similar to a slow-decomposing spruce, that are able to keep carbon stored in the high-quality wood for longer.
Similar to the work of the American chestnut, we focus on studying our seedlings on land that otherwise would not be productive for carbon drawdown like abandon mine lands.
Thanks for replying.
It's always a privilege to receive such a well thought out answer to an off the cuff post like mine above.
I believe we are both arguing from two orthogonal axes. You are responding from the rational perspective and I am responding from an emotional one.
From my perspective, so many promises like this have been made to fix the world with this 'one simple trick' that it raises way to many alarm bells for me.
I go on vacation at a town where there was a famous protest which prevented a forestry company from cutting a large swath of old growth.
The natives managed to defend their claim and the land is uncut to this day. I spoke to some of them and their leaders said more or less: "The forest has always taken care of us, and we don't know how it works so we should leave it the way it is."
And this is from people who have been observing nature in this one spot for 10 000 years. They might have figured some stuff out along the way but generally the white man won't believe them. Both communities are talking past each other because they don't publish papers, and also because we don't spend much time observing nature do its thing.
I guess all I can say is I wish it worked this way, and that fixing our mistakes would be this easy.
Scientifically speaking this work is mighty interesting and desirable, there will be, I suppose, plenty of new discoveries/updates at the micro-molecular level about the photo-syn. processes. Two thumbs up and more power to you, we will learn a great deal about leaf tree photosynthetis on theoretical level.
Having said that, the naive and (forgive me for saying) faulty science behind the idea of using these for "stabilizing" climate is alarming. Ecology and the processes responsible for climate stability is infinitely more complex, and most importantly CO2 does not play central role in it per se. The amount of information processing by micro-biota to render the service of climate stabilization against equilibrium thermodynamics is unreachable in any foreseeable future by humans (ie. there is not even a hope to begin modeling this from first principles -- ignoring the fact for now that no theories exists on the hierarchical correlations among the ecological levels).
Of cause I understand the "advertising" element this work needs to attract funds and investments. That is why I would not unleash my criticism in full scale here (also not appropriate here), but (humbly) I would like to see that you attract real ecologists under the umbrella, and update the narrative to account for the dominant role forests play in on-land water cycle at least on the rudimentary level. Sure, I do not mean to uproot your efforts focusing on details of photosyntheis, but climate stabilization (mean for real, not just advertisement statements) is worth to acknowledge to come as a system. At the same time, I have anxiety that with all the good intentions we can easily cause more harm (as has been done many times prior , eg. corn-ethanol additives, palm oil, etc).
I see an even more fundamental problem: we have taken carbon that was sequestered underground over a period of hundreds of millions of years and released it into the atomsphere in a period of a few hundred years. That genie will not go easily back in its bottle. Even if we could turn all that carbon into wood, it's still above the surface in close contact with oxygen. So not only do we have to grow all that wood, we have to keep it around, i.e. we have to keep it from burning. Forever. As a resident of California, I'm not sanguine about our prospects in this regard.
Yeah but just think, it can be laced with heavy metals when it burns!
Also it can be impossible to process in sawmills because of the dust, and it will chew through sawblades like no wood you’ve ever seen before!
Send it to the moon, use it to build lunar airbnb log cabins. /s
You only have to grow more than you burn, to be carbon negative. The entire world is not dry like southern CA.
Yes, that's obviously true, but it's not so simple. You still have to put all the wood somewhere. The more you have, the harder it will be to find places to store it. The more concentrated the storage, the larger the resulting fires will be when they do inevitably start. Remember, we have to sequester this carbon forever. It's a harder problem even than storing nuclear waste. At least that only needs to be stored for a few tens of thousands of years, and there is a lot less of it.
Exactly. And it's not like our current trees don't capture enough CO2. It's just that we use most of the land for livestock agriculture. The carbon opportunity cost of this is huge [0].
Instead of trying to make trees capture more CO2 artificially or feed seaweed to cows to make them burp less methane, let's just eat less animal products?
I know, it's hard to change people's behaviors. But if you really want to make a dent in climate change, find ways how we can incentivize people to change their behavior (either by financial means like tax and subsidies, or by making better products like plant-based meats).
I'm making a similar comment like I made at yesterday's (?) YC launch of that lab-grown meat company. But that's because for me something like this, while it might be interesting research, is just one of those "future tech magic" things (just like carbon capture and lab-grown meat). We need real solutions, and we need them to work today. Not in 2 years from now.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4.epdf?sharing_token=lgXbpAbkjFrSjOabh_v66NRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0P77FyzGHe2tktE9ZrHAccCF62Zbhw7v9AoX05gp9lKKfvbGYiWvEkliPbe2e81XovvLyHq-XdiyAuDp2Urehw6kn5U8rgjMFeDp4GZPLLotA9UA4C2XbmuaoSDw0f-0Xo%3D https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4.epdf?shar...
We've seen over the past 2 years that people really want to stick to their habits, no matter what. So I'm not against suggesting a _slight change_ in habits. Even something like changing cow meat for other types of meat (lamb, pig, chicken) has a big effect on carbon footprint, and people who want to eat meat still get to eat meat -- just another kind of.
Also, why focus on trees? Grasses, mosses, and algae also photosynthesize and grow faster than trees.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
Evolution is not immune to getting stuck in local maxima.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
I find this theoretical comment so strange because it completely contradicts our experimental knowledge of plants.
Humans been selectively breeding plants for food for thousands of years. Corn that was selectively bred in the Americas looks and functions almost nothing like its wild ancestors. But - by this theoretical argument - this selective breeding shouldn't have worked! If making the plant more food-efficient was possible the corn "would already be doing it".
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
You are anthropomorphizing nature. We human have needs, we modified crops and plants for bigger and tastier fruits and vegetables. Trees and nature doesn't have "needs". During the carboniferous, trees set the atmosphere on fire due to excess of dead trees (wood) and oxygen. They "didn't care". Hopefully, later, creatures evolved & processed trees and a balance was achieved.
> We didn't even understand basic things about trees till like a few decades ago
'We' don't even understand basic things about trees now, because we're operating on old information.
I'm hearing soil scientists griping and sniping about their peers dragging their feet in acknowledging new research. The future is here, but unevenly distributed.
Elaine Ingham has a sometimes-awkward dislike for actinobacteria (formerly called actinomyces, because it looks like a fungus but turns out is not). She has complained on more than one occasion about people still calling it actinomyces. They are a useful microbe, but from a soil metabolism standpoint bacteria tend to be in the 'minus' column and fungi in the 'plus' column. If you've ever done a budget and put something in the wrong column, you know how quickly that can screw up your conclusions.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
I recall someone discovering a while back that chloroplasts have a defense mechanism that reduces photon absorption when transpiration can't keep up with waste (heat?) production from photosynthesis. If they stayed on they would fry themselves, so they shut down by degrees. Whether that's a global optimization or a local one I couldn't say. But if the leaf is the bottleneck, then plants could in fact be photosynthesizing faster. At least during midday.
If someone could select or engineer more efficient pathways, then it could stay 'on' for longer. A chloroplast that produces less waste heat. A more efficient capillary system for bringing water and removing sugars. Maybe even something as simple as min-maxing soil moisture so the leaves have as much water as they could ever want.
Or, it could make a tree that cannot reach the canopy in an established forest, because it's overtrained for full sun.
The push back here is super weird. In addition to being vague, it's irrelevant and full of "what about X".
> spraying glyphosate all over public lands to create 'free to grow'
yes, this is bad. what does it have to do with the post.
> by forestry companies on public land.
also a bummer, but...what does that have to do with the post.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
they don't? we just want to use them to accomplish a goal.
> We didn't even understand basic things about trees till like a few decades ago
Ok? Again, so what.
Some of humanities greatest triumphs are from selective breeding. Wolves didn't "need" to "evolve" into dogs. But we did that because dogs are great. And Brassica oleracea didn't need to turn into broccoli but we made it happen because it's delicious. And we did all this thousands of years ago, without understanding the underlying mechanisms. If OP can accomplish a goal of "eat up more Co2" who cares if humanity doesn't know everything about trees.
That being said, I do have plenty of skepticism about VC funding for this (and most projects in general). There are some really perverse incentives and VCs are generally vultures, so I'd be cautious on how this particular venture shakes out long term. But I don't think the underlying premise can be dismissed with such a superficial understanding of the topic.
> If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
Perhaps trees haven't had the time to adjust to 400+ppm CO2?
This makes me think that, while Chesterton's fence is a great principle, sometimes the best way to find out why there is a fence is to remove it and see what breaks...
>If trees needed to photosynthesise faster they would already be doing it.
I made a comment along similar lines and got downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30632483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30632483 . People really think that good intent is sufficient to justify a path taken.