Living Carbon reposted this
https://lnkd.in/g9_k_-bj Of all the companies I've read about that are experimenting with #carboncapture and #carbonsequestration , I think Living Carbon might be the most ambitious. Lots of people are planting trees (the original carbon capture technology!) but Living Carbon are genetically engineering trees to capture carbon more efficiently and to lock it away more securely after they die. They published a really excellent series of blog posts about the role of photosynthesis in both stabilizing and destabilizing Earth's carbon cycles, throughout deep time - billions of years. I highly recommend reading these posts; they will change your perspective. There's a tendency to think of CO2 as "pollution" and pollution as "bad" because it's "unnatural". But that's the wrong way to think about it. CO2 is an essential part of the Earth's geological and biological cycles. Life couldn't exist without it. It's just that right now the balance between sources and sinks is out of whack, because of humans' tendency to find fossilized carbon, laid down during the Paleozoic, and relocate it from the ground into the sky. This is bad, but it's not bad because it's "unnatural" or because it will "destroy the earth". The Earth has survived periods where CO2 concentrations were ten times higher. It's just that there were no polar icecaps - or multicellular life. Earth bounced back from the Permian-Triassic extinction, which was worse than anything humans can do. Eventually new species evolved and a new equilibrium was formed. It just took, you know, tens of millions of years. The Earth will eventually bounce back from whatever humans do, and it will find a new equilibrium, millions of years from now. It's just that we won't like what happens in the meantime. If we want to preserve the climactic conditions that made human civilization possible - and that make it possible to grow enough food to feed 8 billion humans - then we need to get carbon sinks back in balance with carbon sources. This is why I say: we should all be environmentalists, but not in order to "save the Earth". The Earth will go on. We should be environmentalists in order to save the humans!
