Engineering trees for profit

Recent news that a San Francisco-based biotech startup has begun planting super-fast-growing, genetically-engineered trees that suck CO2 out of the air 50 per cent faster than normal trees should cheer anyone worried about climate change, shouldn’t it? After all, what could go wrong?

The company, Living Carbon, claims that its engineered poplars, having been shot up with undisclosed, non-tree genes, grow 50 per cent faster than wild poplars –thereby, it is assumed, sequestering 50 per cent more CO2 in the same amount of time. It achieved this by speeding up natural photosynthesis using genetic modification, thus “enhancing natural systems” to catch up with industrial humanity’s speeded-up release of greenhouse gases. According to its website: “It is an opportunity to learn how to use technology to rebalance our ecosystems rather than further alienate us from them.”

The tree-planting offset market, so central to net-zero strategies, rests on falsehoods

Such is Silicon Valley’s boundless faith in technology, despite the glaring fact that it is technology that has unbalanced the planet and alienated us from it. It’s like Elon Musk telling us that colonising Mars will help us to save a degraded Earth. Or a doctor prescribing whisky to sober up a drunk.

Doubts abound about GM trees. To begin with, the evidence is thin, coming from a single, five-month observation of some seedlings in a greenhouse. There are no peer-reviewed papers, and no field trials.

Further, Living Carbon effectively snuck around safety guardrails by using an older, more crude gene transfer method than current technologies, in order to take advantage of a since-closed loophole in US government safety regulations to rush the trees into the ground. Is this cutting red tape, or cutting corners? There are good reasons for caution when monkeying with ecosystems: ask an Australian about cane toads and rabbits. It’s no surprise that China is the only country that has so far permitted uncontained planting of quantities of genetically engineered trees.

Moving genes from one species to another is even more fraught. Tweaking one gene to produce one result isn’t all that hard these days. What is, is understanding what will happen in the complexity of natural systems, about which we remain fundamentally ignorant. The National Park founder John Muir is often quoted as writing: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” But the original sentence in his Journal read: “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.”

We are only beginning to learn how complex forests are, how trees are bound together with microorganisms, fungi, and other trees and plants in enormous, hyper-complex webs of nutrients and communications operating at molecular levels. These mechanisms, like photosynthesis, were honed by evolution over the entire history of life on Earth. Who are we to say they are inefficient and must be improved?

Venture capital-funded genetic entrepreneurs, that’s who. The co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon previously worked for OpenAI, which developed the chatbot ChatGPT, in order to improve on humans, while making a profit. Funding for the four-year-old venture, to date $36 million, has come from Silicon Valley investors, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Capitalists seeing a profit opportunity while saving the world… from capitalists, has a certain simple circularity that might be attractive to… venture capitalists. But, as they often seem to do, these VCs have failed to see that the business model is crap. True, the trees’ doubled growth-speed would presumably attract landowners to be guinea pigs by promising to halve the normal timber rotation, which can be up to 50-60 years in hardwood forests. The main draw, though, is in selling carbon offsets to companies which produce carbon pollution, allowing them to say that they are cancelling them out.

But the premise is false: it rests on actually storing the carbon, which means never cutting the trees, since the vast majority of claimed “green” uses for harvested timber are in reality carbon positive, not negative, making matters worse. Furthermore, claims that planting trees prevents carbon emissions are at best flimsy. A recent investigation, by the Guardian, Die Zeit, and others, into the claims of Verra, the world’s largest forestry carbon offset certifier – used by Disney, Shell, Gucci, Salesforce, BHP, easyJet, and the band Pearl Jam – has shown that 90 per cent of the offsets certified have been ineffective at genuinely reducing carbon. Tree plantations usually fail due to poor design, execution, and absence of maintenance. Even the successes fail to prevent forest destruction elsewhere, which continues to spike across most of the world.

The tree planting offset market is worth billions and is central to the “net-zero” strategies of many corporations and even countries, but it rests on proven falsehoods. Nevertheless, its growth, like that of the juiced-up poplars, shows no signs of slowing.

This disconnect is, in part, a mystery of faith – the faith of believers in technology as the solution to climate change, rather than changing our behaviour. But it also relies on what certain Christian churches call “good works”: actions in this world, including payments, that support the cause. Such were the indulgences that the Catholic Church sold to sinners to avoid punishment, in effect offsetting their sins. These transactions were a big goad to the Reformation – Martin Luther testily quoted one indulgence dealer’s jingle: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs,” in his 28th Thesis, which he nailed to the cathedral door. For modern-day corporations, and at least one rock band with a big carbon footprint, buying trees is the newest indulgence, allowing them to keep sinning by burning carbon.

But Mother Nature doesn’t need help teaching trees to turn CO2 into O2 and wood. She’s been doing that for a long time, in ways so subtle and complex that even Silicon Valley can’t steal her secrets. Nature needs us to stop destroying forests. The trees will work their magic, rebalancing our ecosystems, all by themselves.

Wade Graham is an author, environmentalist and academic. He lives in LA