Carbocene Industries is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institution dedicated to rebalancing the Earth's climate. We conduct research, advocacy, and experimentation to accelerate natural carbon drawdown using open systems—leveraging the power of the living world to restore degraded ecosystems and ensure a stable planetary future.
Anthropogenic climate change is a problem of planetary scale. It is the consequence of a geological scale event, and requires geological scale solutions. The history of the Earth is written in sudden, massive shifts in the carbon cycle—from the evolution of the first land plants in the Carboniferous, to the Azolla event in the Eocene. These shifts were driven by living systems doing what they do best: self-organizing to capture energy and carbon. We are simply the latest species to cause such a shock, but we are the first with the ability to deliberately intervene and move the global system back toward a stable, balanced climate.
Most current approaches to carbon removal rely on closed systems—industrial processes that are energetically expensive and difficult to scale. At Carbocene Industries, we look to the deep time record for analogues. We believe that open system drawdown—leveraging the vast, self-sustaining power of the biosphere—is our most viable path forward.
As a nonprofit, we are not beholden to the idiosyncratic demands of carbon credit markets or venture capital growth cycles. This allows us to freely deploy synthetic biology in the public interest. Our current focus is the propagation and open deployment of our photosynthesis-enhanced aspen, an engineered ecotype that captures carbon at a significantly accelerated rate. By integrating these trees into functional, mixed-stand forests, we can enhance the drawdown capacity of the terrestrial biosphere.
Looking forward, we are working to develop additional climatically and ecologically restorative plants that also offer significant economic and societal benefits. These include species engineered for delayed decomposition to mimic the long-term carbon storage of the Carboniferous period—providing carbon-negative, rot-resistant construction materials—as well as agricultural plants optimized to thrive in shifting climatic zones to secure and improve the global food supply.
Our goal is not to preserve an idealized, untouched wilderness, but to boldly integrate human intentionality with the natural world. By communicating with plants and empowering them to increase their rate of carbon drawdown, we can take responsibility for the world we have built and work as partners in the ongoing evolution of the biosphere.
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