Should we use GMO trees to slow climate change？

Yeah. This tree has been genetically engineered to capture more carbon. How is that? Yeah. Over the past few decades, genetic engineering has given us the power to manipulate living things. Crops, animals, even humans. At the same time, we've been facing a man-made disaster of global scale. Driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions. What I'm saying is the planet's on ******* fire. So now, researchers are trying to use genetic engineering to help slow climate change. In this case, by building. These are super trees. Super trees. If it works, it could strengthen one of our best allies in this fight. But hold on. Easier said than done. None of it will work unless we stop putting so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The difference that mass tree planting can make is limited. But it's a step in the right direction. We genuinely need all the help we can get. This is the behind-the-scenes story of one big ambitious project. But the really huge idea here isn't so much about these plants as it is about us. It's the idea that sometime soon, humanity is going to need to take on a responsibility that no species has ever had before. To deliberately, continuously regulate the atmosphere of a planet on behalf of every living thing on it. And we need to decide. How much do we change other species to do it? You might recognize this as a urine sample container. You're not wrong. When you're working in creative science, you need to use whatever materials you can get a hold of. That's Maddie Hall, CEO of the company that's engineering these trees. So this is where we do a lot of our actual genetic engineering. So where we're incorporating new genes that come from other plants. This is where all of our plants start. I'll show one example right here. And they've been put on what's called selection media. And that allows for the plant cells that have had the new genes incorporated to continue to grow and eventually start to make shoots and roots. All right. Here's how these trees are different from their unaltered friends. So you already know that trees take in carbon dioxide and sunlight and water and put out oxygen and sugars through the process of photosynthesis. Cool. So one way to get a tree to capture more carbon is to make this process happen more efficiently. It turns out that one of the key parts of photosynthesis, an enzyme called rubisco, has a bad habit. It should be picking up CO2, but sometimes it picks up oxygen instead. The result is photorespiration, a process that wastes energy and actually releases carbon dioxide. But you can alter the expression of the genes that control this process using an old and reliable tool that is, no joke, called a gene gun. It's a device called the gene gun, where you coat particles of gold with DNA fragments and then shoot those gold particles into the cell. You actually get incorporation into the genome of the plant cell. And it's a really interesting way to incorporate new traits and new genes into plants because it doesn't use any bacteria. It was actually invented a long time ago, but it's popular from a regulatory perspective because you're not introducing any non-plant pesticides. If you do that, the question becomes, does the change actually increase the efficiency of photosynthesis and increase how much carbon the tree sucks in? The answer seems to be yes. According to early results, some seedlings show enhanced photosynthesis and a higher rate of carbon assimilation. So at the very least, it's possible that we could meaningfully increase how much carbon some trees suck out of the atmosphere. That alone is wild. But now that we think we can, should we? But before we get to that, I want to show you something. So a few months ago, I went down the rabbit hole researching the art market for a video. I got very into it. I was looking at all of these incredible works of art and just imagining owning something like that. And then I probably had the thought that all of you might have had, which is, I don't have $2.4 million to spend on a painting. But the wonderful sponsor for this episode is a company called Masterworks, which lets you own a stake in a work of art like that. It's like owning a little piece of a Picasso or a Monet or a Banksy or a Basquiat, a little piece of a masterpiece. The way that this works is by breaking the painting up into shares. Basically, Masterworks buys a painting, they register it with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an LLC, and then members are basically investing in the company that is that painting. Masterworks were the first people to do this. It took years for the first painting to get approved. But now, with the SEC's support, they've created this whole new way of investing in art, which I think is pretty cool. And they're giving you priority to skip their waitlist if you want it, so you can go check out the link in my description to join over 400,000 members already on the platform. That's a lot. Back to the episode. Someone want to tell us where we're going? We're going to San Francisco State. I'm headed to visit the company's greenhouse with Maddie and her co-founder, Patrick. To figure out what I actually think about using these genetically engineered trees, I have three big questions. Number one. Why not just plant more trees? Why change the tree's essence? If we are just planting more trees, but we're not thinking about increasing the ability of those trees to draw down carbon, then we would need to plant a trillion trees to be able to account for anthropogenic human carbon emissions. If we could reduce that to something a little bit above 500 billion instead of a trillion, that is a huge increment in terms of having to plant less trees to deal with the carbon addition that we already have. A change that seems small with one individual organism magnifies to something much larger when spread over a large number of organisms. The key idea here is that for all of this research to be worth it, they don't actually have to improve all of these trees. They just have to reduce the total number of them, maybe toward the end, enough to be more than the amount that they spend on research. That seems pretty reasonable. But planting this many trees, just the genetically unaltered kind, has become surprisingly controversial. Here's the problem. When trees bring in carbon dioxide to do photosynthesis, it does reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air around them. But when their leaves fall, or when they die or decompose, much of that carbon is released back into the atmosphere within just a year or a few years. This is the fast carbon cycle. It's why you see this zigzag in famous graphs measuring carbon dioxide concentrations. Plants sucking in and releasing in that location every year. It's like the Earth is breathing. But when we burn fossil fuels, we're putting extra CO2 into the atmosphere from somewhere else, deep below the surface, compressed biomass that got buried underground, or sunk deep in the ocean, and trapped for centuries. This is the slow carbon cycle. So it's important that we don't just plant trees that only do this. We need all kinds of efforts. And if we do plant lots of trees, we need them to do more of this. In theory, trees that trap more carbon could be a big help there if they then decay and get trapped themselves. Which brings me to question two. I think that a lot of the time when people hear about genetic engineering for a plant that might go into the wild, they often jump to invasive species. I'm curious how you think about that problem. I think like the work that we do on our photosynthesis enhancement tree, we don't want to do it in just like one species and then plant that species at scale and introducing a new species that isn't naturally planted in an environment is very different. Like loblolly pine is a native species to southeastern Georgia. Another species that we're working on, longleaf, is also native. This is a challenge for tree planting efforts in general. Planting trees that might grow quickly but aren't native can actually make the carbon problem worse by changing the delicate balance of other plants and microbes and soil nearby. So I was glad to hear that Maddie and Patrick's goal has never been to put their specific genetically engineered trees everywhere. It's to be an example of how scientists can enhance photosynthesis in the plants native to their environments, maybe inspiring local groups around the world. Yes, and honestly that was one of the reasons why we shared all of our research on photosynthetic efficiency very, very publicly because we don't want to be the only forest biotech company working on climate change and carbon removal because it's a really big problem. My hope is that our work actually inspires other people to look at other ways of improving the growth rate and carbon capture of trees. Where are we now? We are approaching the greenhouse. The most relaxing part of my day. This is pretty cool. These plants are at least roughly the same age. And one is genetically engineered and the other is not? No, this one isn't and this one is. Yeah. The obvious difference to me here is size. Like that looks like a super tree. Are we just going to have huge forests? But Patrick tells me I'm jumping the gun. We don't have any evidence that the final size of the trees will be different. Yes, there's like more biomass accumulating more quickly but it doesn't mean that the tree necessarily has a larger final adult size. It just means that it gets to whatever size it gets more quickly. All right, so we've seen the lab, we've seen the greenhouse. Tell me what the state of living carbon is right now. We're on the cusp of acceleration and the cusp of actually moving to being a commercially tree planting operation which is so exciting. By the end of 2023, right now we have space to do about 2.6 million trees but we can actually get that number up to over 10 million. This is like the first commercial planting of a photosynthesis enhanced tree. At commercial scale and a photosynthesis enhanced organism in the history of the world. And not to say that like oh this is this big thing that we're doing it's going to solve climate change. No, this is the beginning. So now we get to my last question. What's the huge vision here? Like what happens if this works? Patrick's answer was even bigger than I imagined. Humans are not the first species to destabilize the atmosphere. If you go back to when algae first evolved, those organisms produced oxygen and it caused an immense mass extinction. Living carbon, I would say we represent a recognition of at least some humans that in the future it is going to be necessary for humans to be the species that regulates the composition of the atmosphere for the biosphere. I'm imagining like a subcommittee for survival. A ministry for the continuation of life on earth. The United Atmospheric Supervision Force. It would be a responsibility at a level no species that we know of has ever had before. Humans aren't the first species to destabilize the atmosphere. But maybe we could be the last.