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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 addres

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.

lvs 5y ago
gerbilly 5y ago
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.
- helena_merk 5y ago
  Living Carbon and/or Maddie/Patrik never claimed this would be a "one simple trick" solution to the climate crisis. Solutions that address 1% of the problem are worth doing-- no single approach will be able to dig us out of the hole we are in and we need to attempt to address it from all angles.
goatsneez 5y ago
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).
hedora 5y ago
Hi! I'm interested in carbon farming. We have some land that's probably not very well suited to it, honestly, but are looking into doing something with it. It's hard to say what approach to take, and information is scarce. It would be great if projects such as yours advertised net CO2 captured per acre per year, and also $ per CO2-equivalent greenhouse reduction. Climate ranges would also be good. Do these trees grow well in dry areas, for example?
- maddiehalla 5y ago
  would be happy to discuss with you and see if doing a pilot project make sense! land (@) livingcarbon.com
kk58 5y ago
I'm not sure why the focus is on trees. Peatland,grassland, blue carbon all have really high carbon capture potential. Perhaps with trees it's easier to get carbon credits
hinkley 5y ago
The 'man behind the throne' in these forest dynamics is fungi. Trees can fuse roots with their offspring and sometimes cousins (related species). If fungi and humans disappeared tomorrow some trees would still be mother trees, boosting the metabolism of their neighbors. But most of the water and nutrient transport between trees and the ground in temperate forests (where most of the soil carbon exists) is brokered by fungi, and the carbon they trade it for makes up a lot of that soil carbon. And when you cut down a tree, more than half of the carbon in that tree stays behind in the ground (although I implore scientists to challenge and test this result further. A few of you and a number of the rest of us think this number is low and these numbers influence climate policy a great deal). If you're engineering trees for carbon sequestration - for actual carbon sequestration, instead of for profiting off carbon sequestration - you probably need to look at root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size. One is fixing a problem. The other is gaming a system that is trying to save us from destroying ourselves. It's tantamount to wartime profiteering.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  > root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size one could consider the soil itself as a living organism by the ton, and I would hope conversations around sequestering carbon will transition into conversations around increasing total biomass on earth. Carbon gets top billing because its easily measurable and has a direct influence on the greenhouse effect, but the costs of climate change really come from the climate becoming more chaotic - every living organism acts as a buffer for storing energy, carbon, and water - the more life on earth, the more stable the atmosphere becomes. (I'm no climate scientist, this is my impression from reading Charles Eisenstein's Climate: a New Story, totally turned me around on being fatalistic about climate change)
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Gabe Brown refers to the sugars plants offer to fungi as 'liquid carbon'. Ingham calls them 'soil exudates', which is technically more accurate but I think both get the point across. We can definitely use soil recarbonization as an air brake (pun not intended) for atmospheric carbon increases, but at the end of the day we enjoy an environment that was created by trees running unchecked for millions of years depositing carbon dioxide in the ground, before other fungi learned to eat lignin and slowed the process down. When you're trying to change habits you need something to do, instead of a list of things not to do, and planting trees and learning how to make them happy are certainly things we can do.

lvs 5y ago

gerbilly 5y ago

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.

helena_merk 5y ago
Living Carbon and/or Maddie/Patrik never claimed this would be a "one simple trick" solution to the climate crisis. Solutions that address 1% of the problem are worth doing-- no single approach will be able to dig us out of the hole we are in and we need to attempt to address it from all angles.

goatsneez 5y ago

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).

hedora 5y ago

Hi! I'm interested in carbon farming. We have some land that's probably not very well suited to it, honestly, but are looking into doing something with it. It's hard to say what approach to take, and information is scarce. It would be great if projects such as yours advertised net CO2 captured per acre per year, and also $ per CO2-equivalent greenhouse reduction. Climate ranges would also be good. Do these trees grow well in dry areas, for example?

maddiehalla 5y ago
would be happy to discuss with you and see if doing a pilot project make sense! land (@) livingcarbon.com

kk58 5y ago

I'm not sure why the focus is on trees. Peatland,grassland, blue carbon all have really high carbon capture potential. Perhaps with trees it's easier to get carbon credits

hinkley 5y ago

The 'man behind the throne' in these forest dynamics is fungi. Trees can fuse roots with their offspring and sometimes cousins (related species). If fungi and humans disappeared tomorrow some trees would still be mother trees, boosting the metabolism of their neighbors. But most of the water and nutrient transport between trees and the ground in temperate forests (where most of the soil carbon exists) is brokered by fungi, and the carbon they trade it for makes up a lot of that soil carbon. And when you cut down a tree, more than half of the carbon in that tree stays behind in the ground (although I implore scientists to challenge and test this result further. A few of you and a number of the rest of us think this number is low and these numbers influence climate policy a great deal). If you're engineering trees for carbon sequestration - for actual carbon sequestration, instead of for profiting off carbon sequestration - you probably need to look at root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size. One is fixing a problem. The other is gaming a system that is trying to save us from destroying ourselves. It's tantamount to wartime profiteering.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
> root fusion and fungal symbiosis, rather than trunk volume and canopy size one could consider the soil itself as a living organism by the ton, and I would hope conversations around sequestering carbon will transition into conversations around increasing total biomass on earth. Carbon gets top billing because its easily measurable and has a direct influence on the greenhouse effect, but the costs of climate change really come from the climate becoming more chaotic - every living organism acts as a buffer for storing energy, carbon, and water - the more life on earth, the more stable the atmosphere becomes. (I'm no climate scientist, this is my impression from reading Charles Eisenstein's Climate: a New Story, totally turned me around on being fatalistic about climate change)
- hinkley 5y ago
  Gabe Brown refers to the sugars plants offer to fungi as 'liquid carbon'. Ingham calls them 'soil exudates', which is technically more accurate but I think both get the point across. We can definitely use soil recarbonization as an air brake (pun not intended) for atmospheric carbon increases, but at the end of the day we enjoy an environment that was created by trees running unchecked for millions of years depositing carbon dioxide in the ground, before other fungi learned to eat lignin and slowed the process down. When you're trying to change habits you need something to do, instead of a list of things not to do, and planting trees and learning how to make them happy are certainly things we can do.