Not long afterward, she met Mellor at a climate conference. Late in 2019, Hall settled on the name for her startup: Living Carbon. Each year, much of the carbon in a crop plant’s biomass gets returned to the atmosphere after it’s consumed, whether by microbes or fungi or human beings. As for the plants’ ability to remove atmospheric carbon over the long term, the new trick doesn’t help much. The breakthrough offered good news for the world’s natural landscapes: if this genetic pathway yields more productive crops, we’ll need less farmland, sparing forests and grasslands that otherwise would have to be cleared. These genetically tweaked plants grew 25% larger than controls. The researchers inserted genes into tobacco plants that helped them turn the toxin-like material into more sugar. A quarter or more of the carbon absorbed by plants can be wasted through this process, known as photorespiration. As the plant processes this material, it must burn some of its sugars, thereby releasing carbon back to the sky.

Sometimes the enzyme accidentally bonds with oxygen, a mistake that yields something akin to a toxin. They solved a problem presented by RuBisCO, an enzyme many plants use to grab atmospheric carbon. They burn some sugars for energy and use some to build more plant matter-a store of carbon.Ī research group based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign supercharged this process, publishing their results in early 2019. In photosynthesis, plants pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and use the energy from sunlight to turn it into sugars. “I’m kind of a little conflicted,” he said, “that they’re going ahead with this-all the public relations and the financing-on something that we don’t know if it works.” But academics who study forest health and tree photosynthesis question whether the trees will be able to absorb as much carbon as advertised.Įven Steve Strauss, a prominent tree geneticist at Oregon State University who briefly served on Living Carbon’s scientific advisory board and is conducting field trials for the company, told me in the days before the first planting that the trees might not grow as well as natural poplars. They’re working with larger companies, to which they plan to deliver credits in the coming years. Living Carbon has already sold carbon credits for its new forest to individual consumers interested in paying to offset some of their own greenhouse gas emissions. How will these trees affect the rest of the forest? How far will their genes spread? And how good are they, really, at pulling more carbon from the atmosphere? This is a breakthrough, clearly: it’s the first forest in the United States that contains genetically engineered trees. And crucially, when each generation of ferns died, they settled into saltier water that helped inhibit decay, keeping microbes from releasing the ferns’ stored carbon back into the atmosphere. The arrangement of continental plates at the time meant the Arctic Ocean was mostly enclosed, like a massive lake, which allowed a thin layer of fresh river water to collect atop it, creating the kind of conditions the ferns needed. Certain fluke conditions seem to have helped the Azollas along, though. Patrick Mellor, paleobiologist and chief technology officer of the biotech startup Living Carbon, sees a lesson in the story about these diminutive ferns: photosynthesis can save the world. Azollas are among the fastest-growing plants on the planet, and the scientists theorized that if such ferns coated the ocean, they could have consumed huge quantities of carbon, helping scrub the atmosphere of greenhouse gasses and thereby cooling the planet. The site suggested that the Arctic Ocean may have been covered for a time in vast mats of small-leaved aquatic Azolla ferns.

Eventually, scientists drilling into Arctic mud discovered a potential clue: a layer of fossilized freshwater ferns up to 20 meters thick.

What caused the change was, for decades, unclear.

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