COULD GM TREES OFFER AN IMPROVED SOLUTION TO CARBON CAPTURE.

What is clear is that the fight against climate change is not just about reducing carbon emissions. Scientists estimate that to keep Earth’s climate at stable temperature, some 10 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere must be removed each year by the middle of this century. Engineers are developing machines that suck carbon out of the air, and power plants that can store it deep underground, but so far neither method has been proven efficient at scale. That’s why some think it’s time for nature’s greatest carbon-hoovering creation to get an upgrade.
Living Carbon, a start-up in San Francisco, raised $21 million earlier this year with that exact approach: For its first product, it modified the genetics of poplar trees to grow 50% faster and capture 27% more carbon than before, at least in greenhouse conditions. Now the company is planting as many as 5 million of these trees—likely the first widespread use of genetically modified trees in the US.














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