Comment by TimorousBestie
Comment by TimorousBestie 4 days ago
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-wh...
Comment by TimorousBestie 4 days ago
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-wh...
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.
Yeah, ok. I read about half the article and it was just talking about growing tomatoes in Texas rather than their homeland of the northern Andes.
Now I see in the last paragraph it says C4 photosynthesis is more efficient in hot climates and C3 more efficient in cooler climates.
I don't see though what's the benefit of bioengineering C3 plants to operate with C4, rather than to utilise C4 plants where the climate is suitable for them?
Sure, we should diversify our food sources. The stat is something like 20k+ edible plants, but 90% of calories come from 20 of them, and 50% come from wheat/rice/maize.
(Note that maize, sugar cane, sorghum, and some millets are C4 crops already in use.)
It takes a lot of selective breeding to develop varieties that are palatable, productive, climate adapted, (remain) disease resistant, amenable to automation, etc etc. There are folks doing amazing work in their backyard to improve promising and interesting species (see "landrace gardening" community. It's super cool how one can leave a "genetic legacy" for future generations this way.) And of course university and extension office breeding programs too.
Many people believe that we need to shift towards a more management-intensive perennial-emphasized polyculture / "permaculture" type approach in order to create diverse and resilient systems tailored to the local conditions. But then the entire food consumption system needs to align on top of that. Lots of coordination problems.
So of course the big industrial ag systems are also doing things their way, which includes modern biotechnology. I'm not opposed to that - if I could wave a wand to improve some crops I certainly would. Hopefully we get lots of people exploring all types of solutions.
Some areas are already running short on arable land suitable for some C3 species. Check out the napa cabbage harvests from Japan and South Korea, for example. Japanese rice production is also struggling, though that’s a more complicated example with several causes.
In a similar vein, one of the most obvious and easy-to-show-people impacts of climate change on agro-economics is the shifting wine growing region, especially for champagne. You now have these prestigious French champagne houses planting vineyards in England!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Exactly. Runaway capitalism is the fuel of our climate emergency. Boats and planes delivering container loads of plastic shit around the world. People flying to Europe for the weekend.
The best fix at this time, since we humans have shown ourselves to be collectively incapable of doing the right things, would be to push a stick into the spokes and bring the whole system crashing down.
Guess who seems to be doing just that (though for all the wrong reasons). If the rabid US leadership manages to crash the global economy, that could be the single biggest reduction in emissions in history.
> 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.
All that cash and he’s only asking for 5 GW of improvements to existing reactors and ten “new large reactors.” So what, 20 GW total? By 2030.
That doesn’t come close to satisfying an AI power consumption estimate of 68 GW by 2027 and 327 GW by 2030. [1]
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3572-1.html
> 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.
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.
CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks.
And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
While earnest, I’ve heard this claim for 30 years - that it’s simple political will. The reality is that until very recently there were only two economically viable carbon neutral energy sources. We now have four, however there are real unsolved problems with scaling three of those solutions. The only technology which can reliably solve the crises brings along its own set of externalities.
It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
“Horse and buggy”. How dramatic.
If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
Disingenuous. Here is the correct chart to link if you want to assert emissions by country: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree.
Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there.
Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.
Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
China turning the corner on emissions has far more to do with their desire to get out from under the possibility of an oil blockade locking up their economy than green pressure from the west. They also organically have an environmental movement, though not one that they are willing to kowtow to at the cost of growth.
Another factor for China was their cities choking on smog. One of the anecdotes I remember from Covid was that mask wearing in Asian cities was just another thing you did depending on that aspect of the weather, except in 2020 it had another reason behind it.
I think a cap on what consumption you're allowed until you can prove utility to society would be beneficial. That said, with crypto it was distributed so it'd be extremely hard to enforce, and using the example of how AI has played out there's companies willing and able to dump money speculating on it just so they don't lose out if it does bear fruit. I expect for anything in future that shows potential they can organize themselves around regulations faster than new rules and enforcement could adapt.
Disturbingly authoritarian impulses for a dubious prescription.
The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.
Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.
Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.
China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.
It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
Notably, I’d count ‘technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions’ as cutting back on the crazy.
I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
> cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing
How would you get grant money for that?
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
> 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."
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.
What's the connection? I thought the Ci would be Koppen climate classification but it's actually alternate carbon-fixing photosynthetic processes