Capitalizing on trees’ ability to function as natural carbon capture machines, Reddit’s former CEO is now running a company that restores forests on degraded land… In the Bay Area, a company called Living Carbon is engineering trees that can capture and store more carbon than typical trees.
The company plans to share more details about the technology later in the year, but it builds on previous research, including years of work from other scientists looking at how to enhance photosynthesis in other plants.
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[Forest biotechnology expert Steve] Strauss argues that prevailing attitudes about genetic engineering are holding back other innovations that could also be critical now, such as helping trees survive changing conditions because of the climate crisis.
“Why is the United States of America so retrograde when it comes to biotech?” he asks. “Given the challenges, we should be testing heat tolerance in trees in the ground as we get hotter and hotter. And drought tolerance. There’s all kinds of promising genes that we could be testing and essentially almost none of that’s going on.” The U.S. government should be funding this research, he says—not just Silicon Valley.
Ledmonkey96 on July 5th, 2021 at 17:48 UTC »
Weird since 90% of the time I hear about people against GMO's it's Europe
Case in point a company like this would be buried in red tape in Europe, heck even this article isn't about people being against GMO's it's about the CEO wanting government Grant's and finances
Sawses on July 5th, 2021 at 16:54 UTC »
The USA is literally the biotech hub of the world. It's only in the last like 10 years that Europe and especially China are catching up. Australia is nowhere close and basically nowhere else in the world even has a hat in the ring.
chotchss on July 5th, 2021 at 14:45 UTC »
Hate to say it, but adoption/acceptance of GMOs is way higher in the US than Europe. If Strauss thinks that the US is not doing enough to grow the right trees for the future, he's going to be in for a real shock when he learns of European attitudes to modified plants.