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piqer for: Climate and Environment Global finds Globalization and politics
I'm a freelance journalist, currently based in Madrid. I used to be a News Producer at CNBC in London before, but I thought a little bit more sun might do me good. Now I write for several news organizations, covering a range of topics, from Spanish politics and human rights for Deutsche Welle to climate change for La Marea.
Could This Be The Cheapest Solution To Climate Change?
A few months ago, the debate about negative emissions wasn't quite on the agenda. Now, after COP23, and the opening of the first such energy plant (in Iceland), it seems clear that we must remove already existing CO2 from the atmosphere. We'll have to consider carbon capture and storage (CCS) if we want to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.
But CCS (and its bio-energy cousin BECCS) has a downside: It's quite expensive. Relying only on this technology to remove CO2 would be foolish. We still have to transition to a 100% renewable energy, and we still have to rethink our production, distribution and consumption models. But even then, it may not be enough.
Enter Dr. Joanne Chory of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). She and her team study how plants adapt to different conditions and environments, and she thinks she may have stumbled upon a chance to fix half of the carbon dioxide we spew out into the atmosphere every year. And how to do it cheaply.
The answer is suberin (more commonly known as cork). This substance is not biodegradable, and it fixes a large amount of carbon. It's not only found in cork trees, but also in the roots of many plants. According to Dr. Chory, simple cross-breeding techniques could produce plants that capture a lot of our CO2.
“We did the numbers,” says Chory, “and the numbers say you need about five percent of the world’s farmland growing highly-enriched suberin crops to fix fifty percent of all the CO2 that we’re putting up there.”
I'm not going to lie to you. This article lacks in depth and I would have liked to see some practical examples. It's just too often that we hear about miracle solutions to climate change, and I'm afraid this could be one more of those. However, the topic is hugely interesting, and I think that now that the BECCS debate is finally getting here, all these ideas can help.
It definitely deserves more research, and I'll keep my eye on it.
thanks for this piq! and, yes, please keep an eye on it. i share your scepticism about the feasibility of this approach but in principle i sympathize with biological solutions more than with solutions by traditional engineering.