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This is why it’s important for us to develop C4 alternatives to existing C3-using food staples. https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-what-

This is why it’s important for us to develop C4 alternatives to existing C3-using food staples. https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-what-we-are-doing/ https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-wh...

lazide 1y ago
Not that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  > cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing How would you get grant money for that?
  - squigz 1y ago
    Wouldn't it be the same way one would get money for bioengineering the global ecosystem? At least we know how we'd go about one of these options.
    - griffzhowl 1y ago
      I think cutting back on what we're doing already wouldn't draw a lot of grant support. We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"... It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh. I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits? I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food. It's a dream but that's how we grow <3
      - squigz 1y ago
        > We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"... With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
        lazide 1y ago
        The average person buys their products (companies) and votes for them (politicians). Blame isn’t even really the thing. It’s just inevitable consequences.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Certainly ain’t gonna stimulate the economy either!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- lumost 1y ago
  What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy? Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people. The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
  - bix6 1y ago
    I volunteer yeah. I can get everywhere I need on my bike so horse and buggy would give me enough range and prevent all the over touristing.
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      there are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available
      - JackMorgan 1y ago
        This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!" It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
      - bix6 1y ago
        Sure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
        1y ago
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Engineering problems are vastly easier than social problems.
- Amezarak 1y ago
  That's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
- graeme 1y ago
  The thing is actually stopping the warming involves: 1. Cutting emissions to zero. Not cutting back, zero 2. Extracting a chunk of co2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it Cutting back just means things get worse less quickly. They still get worse. To solve the issue we should be building nuclear among other things but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. And which will still grow unless we make an economically feasible baseload alternative.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    > but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades Which green movement are you referring to? I understand there are some anti-nuke green parties in some European countries but as far as I can tell they don’t hold all that much political power. > Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. It is not a green movement that is currently interfering with the production of renewable energy sources in the States, that much is evident.
  - beachy 1y ago
    > for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. This is an amusing and antique take on things. Anti-nuclear protests were frequently in the news in the 70s and 80s. As a result, some people with views set in stone in their youth believe that environmentalists are still predominately anti-nuclear. In a strange twist of fate, this mindset is actually helping things today. The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
    - lazide 1y ago
      If that actually happens (and isn’t a giant scam!), along with the crash in global trade cutting emissions there, it would be the most hilarious thing ever. Nixon going to China level.
griffzhowl 1y ago
What's the connection? I thought the Ci would be Koppen climate classification but it's actually alternate carbon-fixing photosynthetic processes
- colechristensen 1y ago
  C4 is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis and allows plants both to produce more energy and to do so with less water which is an adaptation for hotter, drier climates.
- i_k_k 1y ago
  Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair. As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term. C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates. Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing. I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
  - thfuran 1y ago
    Isn’t rubisco also weirdly slow?
    - 1y ago

lazide 1y ago

Not that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.

griffzhowl 1y ago
> cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing How would you get grant money for that?
- squigz 1y ago
  Wouldn't it be the same way one would get money for bioengineering the global ecosystem? At least we know how we'd go about one of these options.
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    I think cutting back on what we're doing already wouldn't draw a lot of grant support. We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"... It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh. I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits? I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food. It's a dream but that's how we grow <3
    - squigz 1y ago
      > We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"... With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
      - lazide 1y ago
        The average person buys their products (companies) and votes for them (politicians). Blame isn’t even really the thing. It’s just inevitable consequences.
- lazide 1y ago
  Certainly ain’t gonna stimulate the economy either!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lumost 1y ago
What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy? Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people. The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
- bix6 1y ago
  I volunteer yeah. I can get everywhere I need on my bike so horse and buggy would give me enough range and prevent all the over touristing.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    there are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available
    - JackMorgan 1y ago
      This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!" It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
    - bix6 1y ago
      Sure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
      - 1y ago
deadbabe 1y ago
Engineering problems are vastly easier than social problems.
Amezarak 1y ago
That's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
graeme 1y ago
The thing is actually stopping the warming involves: 1. Cutting emissions to zero. Not cutting back, zero 2. Extracting a chunk of co2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it Cutting back just means things get worse less quickly. They still get worse. To solve the issue we should be building nuclear among other things but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. And which will still grow unless we make an economically feasible baseload alternative.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  > but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades Which green movement are you referring to? I understand there are some anti-nuke green parties in some European countries but as far as I can tell they don’t hold all that much political power. > Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. It is not a green movement that is currently interfering with the production of renewable energy sources in the States, that much is evident.
- beachy 1y ago
  > for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. This is an amusing and antique take on things. Anti-nuclear protests were frequently in the news in the 70s and 80s. As a result, some people with views set in stone in their youth believe that environmentalists are still predominately anti-nuclear. In a strange twist of fate, this mindset is actually helping things today. The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
  - lazide 1y ago
    If that actually happens (and isn’t a giant scam!), along with the crash in global trade cutting emissions there, it would be the most hilarious thing ever. Nixon going to China level.

griffzhowl 1y ago

What's the connection? I thought the Ci would be Koppen climate classification but it's actually alternate carbon-fixing photosynthetic processes

colechristensen 1y ago
C4 is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis and allows plants both to produce more energy and to do so with less water which is an adaptation for hotter, drier climates.
i_k_k 1y ago
Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair. As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term. C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates. Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing. I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
- thfuran 1y ago
  Isn’t rubisco also weirdly slow?
  - 1y ago