Research, advocacy and experimentation in rebalancing planetary carbon flux toward drawdown using the inherent leverage multiplication properties of open systems, while improving the functional and energetic connectivity of degraded ecologies.
Anthropogenic climate change can be framed as the consequence of human perturbation of global carbon flux due to our evolutionary innovations of conceptual, intentional cognition and language. These faculties confer our ability to conceive of and instantiate ecologically transformative patterns of social and energetic organization such as fire domestication, agriculture and urban society, which have progressively decoupled us from dependence on real time carbon flux, while degrading the functionality of the drawdown component of the carbon cycle.
Carbocene Industries will be devoted to the study and instantiation of flux-based, paleoclimatologically informed, open system methods of carbon drawdown. We will also work to improve the degree of understanding and accurate representation of synthetic biology as an effective method to help reduce the impacts of climate change, both directly through carbon removal and also through improving the ability of plants and other organisms to adapt to the consequences of changing climate. We consider anthropogenic climate change to be a problem of planetary metabolism, the solution of which will improve the metabolic functioning of the earth system as a whole, and provide the opportunity for a step-change in the relationship of humans to the rest of the biosphere, where we assume the role of the first species to intentionally manage global carbon flux.
Regardless of the moral imperative of emissions reduction, there is no world in which large-scale removal in the coming decades is not necessary to retain climatic stability. Carbon removal methods fall into two general categories: closed and open system mediated. In a closed system approach, the energetic inputs to the system are human controlled, and the output is a known mass of fixed carbon, extracted through an industrial process. This carbon is then stored in a long term reservoir, or converted into a form recalcitrant to reemission. Closed system carbon removal, while superficially attractive from a limited perspective of organizational accountability, holds little potential to remove the bulk of accumulated emissions in a meaningful time frame. For example, Direct Air Capture (DAC), the most well developed of these methods, receives significant funding and institutional support, but in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, published by the International Energy Agency, “is scaled up to capture almost 60 MT CO2/year by 2030.” 60 MT of CO2 is equivalent to 16.4 MT of carbon, 0.0041% of what is needed.
Open system removal includes a wide variety of methods that leverage planetary scale processes in the direction of carbon removal. These methods recognize that anthropogenic climate change is the consequence of a geological scale event, and requires geological scale solutions. Examples include using synthetic biology to increase the rate of photosynthetic carbon removal by plants, retarding their decomposition rate, increasing their production of recalcitrant polymers, restoring soil ecology to be more conducive to long term carbon storage, working with the carbonate-oxalate cycle, enhancing weathering processes using basalt and olivine, repleting iron in the oceans to stimulate increased phytoplankton growth, and many more. All of these contain force multipliers which give them a huge advantage over closed system removal. They push the system at whatever scale they are introduced in the direction of downward carbon flux to a far greater extent than the energetic input required for their introduction. Methods that involve living systems are also autocatalytic, unlike any fully technological solution.
Historically, these methods have had a public relations problem. We are not used to considering human interventions that modify natural systems at scale as being good things. In contrast, we argue that recognizing the true scale of our impact on the planet, and responding with methods that empower the system to respond with requisite scale to rebalance, represents humility rather than hubris.
Carbocene Industries will regularly publish articles in collaboration with paleoclimatologists, systems ecologists, and workers in the field of open system drawdown, in order to identify the most effective leverage points for global carbon flux while situating our current conditions in terms of the history of the earth system through deep time. This work will also serve to deepen public understanding of the role that humans can play as the first species in evolutionary history with the capacity to, through the solution of a problem caused by our great need for available energy, intentionally instantiate planetary homeostasis. We will also work on a legislative level to demonstrate the need to establish a specific regulatory framework governing the use of synthetic biology for climate serving to encourage, rather than inhibit, ongoing productive work that has the potential to greatly improve both downward carbon flux and ecological resilience.
We will establish three projects in the coming year. In all of these, we will be working with a variety of hybrid poplar instantiating a photorespiration bypass pathway, which confers an increased rate of carbon capture of up to 50%, depending on site conditions.