For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a US Forest | Hacker News Reader

For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a US Forest

nytimes.com

104 pointsbookofjoe101 comments

The reason stuff like this gets funded and is attractive for investors is that it provides a target for massive polluters to focus on with carbon credits and offsets. This is what allows them to continue to emit co2 at a massive scale and get away with it by paying off the damage they cause. They get to brag about planting a gazillion fancy high tech trees with some inflated statistics about carbon captured that offset their own emissions. At least on paper.

Whether or not this is effective, practical, works at all, etc. does not actually matter to these companies. It's the getting away with massive emissions part that makes this valuable to customers of this company. They get to destroy the planet, but now they wash their hands in innocence while burning some more coal, oil, gas, etc. Basically, schemes like this are form of creative bookkeeping where companies get to green wash their emission problem at a discount.

The obvious solution is a carbon tax, but you'll be called a right wing nut job if you promote that.

Funny; in Canada, supporting the carbon tax gets you called a left wing nutjob.

A lot of people in tge US don't really understand the political views they are espousing, or the histories surrounding those politics, nor do most americans have even the slightest understanding of the political process within their own country. You can forget about the vast majority of US commenters (even here on hacker news) having any knowledge of socialist/communist theory. I'd imagine that the initial commenter is actually unaware of left/right positions or their implications.

(I could be quite wrong, but this seems to be the only sensible explanation for the GP)

Because the US is out of the compass right wing when compared to any other country.

Right wing nut jobs are the most strongly opposed people to a carbon tax that I've ever met. At least in the US you're much more likely to be called a socialist.

You'd think the political right would be for a market solution to global warming, but first they would have to concede that global warming exists, so they won't.

> You'd think the political right would be for a market solution to global warming

My experience is that they take "carbon tax" as only the literal interpretation and opposition to taxes and bureaucracy outweigh everything else, there's hardly a "market solution" in it. Fee and dividend should be more popular, but it gets ignored and eventually won't be enough.

> My experience is that they take "carbon tax" as only the literal interpretation and opposition to taxes and bureaucracy outweigh everything else,

Yeah, and in Canada it's extra frustrating since it is a fee-and-dividend system, not a tax - but the Conservatives love to call it "carbon tax" in order to score easier political points.

But like GP said:

> first they would have to concede that global warming exists, so they won't.

Ah you're right, I was thinking of cap and trade as the market solution, but they won't do that either for the same climate change denial reasons.

> And to head off environmental concerns, Living Carbon’s modified poplar trees are all female, so they won’t produce pollen. While they could be pollinated by wild trees and produce seeds, Mr. Mellor says they’re unlikely to spread into the wild because they don’t breed with the most common poplar species in the Southeast.

Why do I hear the Jurassic Park theme song?

Yep, They are part of the ecosystem now.

I read through the article expecting to read that the genetically engineered variant was sterile. That would be the sensible thing to do.

Life finds a way.

This doesn't seem practical.

https://pyrofarms.com/blogs/pyrofarms-blue-light-special/alg...

"When used in bioreactors, algae is 400 times more efficient than a tree at removing CO2 from the atmosphere."

How is the CO2 sequestered? That is conspicuously missing from that marketing blog post.

In nature, the dying algae fall to the sea floor, and sequester the carbon there.

An easy stimulant to this process is to dump powdered iron into an algal bloom.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

I'd be interested to know more about the carbon cost of production for the powdered iron. I assume you could use scrap metal for this purpose, but scrap metal is already pretty recyclable as I understand it.

I don't think pure iron would work because it's not soluble - what people use are iron sulfates which are minerals that occur naturally.

Ferrous sulphate is available below $100 / ton and seems to already be used in large quantities for wastewater treatment. Doesn't seem hard to source if the same stuff will work for algae.

Okay neat— the WP page for it mentions it being produced at least in part as a byproduct of steel production:

"In the finishing of steel prior to plating or coating, the steel sheet or rod is passed through pickling baths of sulfuric acid. This treatment produces large quantities of iron(II) sulfate as a by-product."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%28II%29_sulfate#Productio...

So I guess that explains why it's so inexpensive, but of course as with many such things (natural gas from oil production, whey from yogurt/cheese production, etc), once there's a robust market for the "byproduct", it can result in changing the original economics.

However, you run the risk of advantaging algae that produce high levels of toxin. Even non-toxic algae starts to do this when concentrated. Since iron fertilization only works far offshore, a lot of our industry has to hope that bloom doesn’t enter the food chain.

>When used in bioreactors*

When used in a sealed climate-controlled chamber that produces the ideal conditions on land for an aquatic plant specie.

IIRC it's ridiculously expensive to scale algae bioreactors, while trees grow and maintain themselves. I wish algae was easier to scale because it does have great potential.

Why don't we just scale them in the oceans?

That might disturb the ocean ecosystem.

And these trees don't?

I think the larger point is that there isn't a simple, obvious, "Why don't we just do XYZ?" solution to the problems being discussed here.

I agree anything we do at scale will affect the ecosystem. However, restoring an ecosystem to a previous state seems less risky than changing oceans to a new state.

Maintaining things sitting in the ocean is still expensive. You can’t send robots out, you must send humans.

Oil rigs are worthwhile just because they can be turned on/off relatively easily depending on market conditions and when they are on, they mint so much money that expensive humans are a rounding error.

Why can't you send robots out?

There are plans to add (I believe) iron oxide to the oceans to increase algae growth. Don't recall the organization's name right now.

I hope not. You can permanently alter (i.e. for decades) the climate in a region by creating an algae bloom.

Out of curiosity, what are the challenges in scaling algae bioreactors?

They're easy to scale in some sense (just make a bunch of small ones), but small reactors have a high surface area to volume ratio -- i.e., a high expense to algae ratio. Making bigger vats is problematic because the work being done is proportional to surface area (light penetration) and because the chance of infection goes up exponentially.

Algae also produce waste that SMELLS. Now you have costs to deal with that, which also reduces _where_ you can put them, since most people don’t necessarily enjoy living near the smell of a wetland.

Then there are the ocean-based startups trying to just assist with what nature does out in nature. Also tough to scale when dealing with dropping structures in the ocean and making sure they work with as little maintenance as possible.

So both indoor “Ideal condition” and outdoor “Ideal condition” growing are actually really tough to scale cost effectively. Doing something _else_ with them while sequestering carbon could be interesting though. I know one team that is using algae to clean up wastewater wile producing electricity. I don’t think they’ll get to cost effective scale, but I think the idea tackles two great problems at once in a creative way, and that’s still progress!

My startup is working on novel microalgae photobioreactors - we are raising an angel/pre-seed round right now.

Our system is far more energy and space efficient compared to PBRs and raceways - we do this via a proprietary mechanism that greatly increases surface area to volume ratio of liquid water in our reactors. Feel free to drop us a line at info[at]skyfarmclimate.tech

I used to be on a research project that attempted to do this with a fungus/algae mix because when grown together the fungus suspended the algae throughout the column of water. That was a fun project that had it's funding pulled, and then I had to get into software engineering to make a living. What's the basic way of accomplishing your improvement?

I can share further details by email, but the gist is we enable much faster gas exchange for microalgae cells compared to existing systems, inside a unique reactor design that gives us some other benefits for common cultivation processes.

What do you dto with the algae after it has grown?

Sell it

Are you by chance growing spirulina algae? It's a popular supplement.

Not at the moment - but it is an option for the future. Technically it is a cyanobacteria not microalgae

Technically both…

Your website makes it sound like you're growing algae for co2 capture, but if you're selling it and not sequestering it then what's the point?

We're selling it as biochar, sorry should have specified.

Weird. So you are supposedly beating everyone in terms of yields and yet focus on producing something worth even less than protein per kg. Wouldn't it make more sense to cream off the market on higher value-added products before scaling up while expanding into increasingly low value products?

if you're trying to sequester carbon.. bury it. anything else will allow it to be released back into the atmosphere anyway

I once read a comment from an expert in that field who said that it was essentially impossible to prevent contamination, and that they had to constantly test and then shut down and sanitize when they discovered a different species of algae in their system.

How do you mitigate that issue? (And good news if you have a solution, that same person said they figured whoever solved that problem would be the world's first trillionaire).

Mitigation strategies are varied, you basically cannot guarantee there will not be any contamination if you are doing any kind of scale. We are looking at polycultures/consortiums (robust ecosystems inside one reactor), various filtration systems and high frequency monitoring. There are some others we won't publish (yet)

It seems indeed rather futile to plant trees for carbon sequestration. Depends on the exact situation, but simply put trees are often almost carbon neutral and at a fairly smale timescale (e.g. [1]) and even if they weren't we'd need a lot of them (e.g. [2]). To the point one starts to wonder whether these so-called 'climate trees' (a term commonly used by some groups in my area) isn't just a product of lobby groups and/or people who don't know a lot about biology or ecosystems. A tree is of course a perfect 'climate excuse': easy to plant a tree, easy to think you're doing something for the climate.

Now, the part about needing a lot of them is also true for these bioreactors. Still doesn't seem super practical. Nor is the storage or use of all that captured carbon? I mean in theory this is great, but practically it's a bit hard to tell if this is doable technologically.

On the other hand there are things which are (purely technically) easier to achieve and more efficient, like wetlands and peatlands (and that also goes for peat forrests, so yes trees) e.g. [3] The numbers are so huge that trying to make sure they don't degrade or aren't converted into farmland or sucked dry and trying to (re)create them by introducing or restoring wetlands to their original form, this seems like something which is actually worth it. I'm not saying it's the only thing to do, I'm aware such land isn't super popular nor practically useful, and maybe I'm missing something else, but it really looks like if you have the choice to either go plant trees somewhere or somehow try to protect peatland, the latter wins when it comes to sequestration.

[1] https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/31440/1/gcb.15229.p... [2] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-many-new-trees-would-we-... [3] https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/peatlands-and-cl...

> It seems indeed rather futile to plant trees for carbon sequestration. Depends on the exact situation, but simply put trees are often almost carbon neutral and at a fairly smale timescale

I'd say this is losing the forest for the trees. An individual tree doesn't matter, what matters is a durable ecosystem. Say a square kilometer of denuded farmland is converted to forest. Thousands of tons of carbon will remain in the plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms and soil as long as the forest stands though the individuals will die. It could be there 10 years or 10,000 years, depends on how long the ecosystem is maintained.

> Say a square kilometer of denuded farmland is converted to forest.

In principle I'd agree, but: again this really depends on soil type and history and surroundings and type of forrest. The forrest won't be bad, but depending on factors as far as sequestration goes (and biodiversity as well to some extent) it could actually be better to turn the farmland into a meadow. Those don't necessarily have to be wetlands to sequester more carbon over the course of years. Just like for every new square kilometer converted to whatever, it might actually be worth more to try and preserve one square kilometer of rainforrest instead of having it cut down.

interesting point, I've read somewhere that from biodiversity, and carbon sequestration viewpoint some forests (corniferous, like taiga) are much poorer than grass steppes. It was argued that mammoths were important because they were strong enough to fall down trees, making space for grass to grow.

Isnt it funny when you finally realize HN's had you on mute for months. ;)

I wonder what the impact on the soil would be. If we have super-charged growth, can the soil support many generations of fast-growing trees?

Also, how does the local biome react to it? Mushrooms and insects have strong symbiosis trees after all.

And as usual for complex systemw, wa don't have a way to reliably model the outcome at scale.

But again as usual, instead of taking precautions and testing this in isolation for 30 years, humans deploy in production.

I guess we'll find out in 20 years and make it someone else's problem!

https://archive.ph/TQ5ro

It would be pretty interesting to see super fast growing Douglas Fir used to crank out mass timber.

Supply-side solution to housing problem?

No, mass timber is just already cheaper than steel and concrete for some buildings so it seems like an interesting avenue for greening up some construction on the cheap.

The housing supply issue is: available land in desirable locations with water and power.

Materials in North America are cheap: https://homenation.com/home/mhe-mansion-mini

Sometimes it's not even the land, but a permission to build something sufficiently large on it.

Perverse tax incentives may also prevent development of perfectly good, prized land: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/5/whats-with-that...

Right, I meant "available" in a broad sense.

We're already harvesting less than we can or should, essentially for political reasons. faster-growing varieties on the loose seem like a way to make the PNW even more flammable.

We've already got super trees (genetically improved). These are selectively bred trees, not GMOs; stuff that gets super site-specific, like 'north side of a hill within 100ft of a stream'. IIRC Weyerhauser pioneered the work in this area...I want to say back in the 60s. They've reduced the time from planting to harvest substantially, something like ~80 years to ~30, and the new stuff is just growing faster.

The main problem is that the growth rings get huge, the lumber is technically stronger, but it's much denser and not well suited for all applications. If you look at old growth, you see sub-mm growth rings in Doug fir, and it's very light. Super trees can be quite substantial, like 1/8 to 1/4 inch. I've heard they burn hotter and more readily too. In my personal experience, old growth will burn all night in your stove but the younger stuff won't last half as long.

Been a while since I've poked my nose into forestry, I've probably got some of the details wrong but that's the gist of it anyway.

I think you have the new = denser, old = lighter backwards? Old growth is denser, new growth is lighter

I seem to recall the fatter growth rings they put in on spring/summer increasing the density of the wood.

You could be right though, I'm having trouble finding it on Google tbh.

The main thing is that the wood quality is different because they want to maximize quantity over quality.

it's absolutely the other way. the dense rot resistant wood from older forests was basically mined away by companies, like wyerehauser and others, over the previous 3 centuries.

My 100-year-old house in British Columbia was built entirely of Douglas Fir. At this point, you can barely pound a nail into the studs and joists. The density is incredible. New lumber feels insubstantial in comparison.

Cross laminated mass timber is highly processed and I would think they would be able to work around this.

I think the real awesome tech would be if you could get super fast growing hardwoods, like Walnut. By boardfoot something like Walnut may be 10x the price of pine. Pine has a lot of good attributes but the main one is that it is cheap and plentiful. I'd imagine if higher quality woods could ever be grown as rapidly then youd get some interesting new construction materials. Or, at the very least, you could get Ikea style furniture but of super high quality wood instead of particle board.

Walnut isn't difficult to source because it grows slowly, though it doesn't grow fast; a walnut tree can grow upwards of a foot a year given good conditions. The problem is that most varieties of walnut are scraggly and actually getting decent boards out of them is difficult.

North American Black Walnut, when grown in it's preferred conditions, is anything but scraggly. Getting good, straight timber from it isn't hard, but it does take good soil, rainfall, and time - from nut to harvestable high quality timber takes something on the order of a human lifetime.

Walnut is basically a weed on my farm - I cut down 25 as saplings for every one I leave to grow to maturity - as it's preferred habitat is in colonizing grassy and weedy areas, where it's huge seed, and rapid growth as a young tree, allow it to get ahead of and above weeds, brush, and many other hardwood species.

Getting good straight timber from black walnut (or most walnuts) is absolutely doable (as evidenced by...us doing it for centuries!). At the same time it's more difficult than you're giving it credit for, though--"its preferred conditions" is a really load-bearing statement! It's not just soil and rainfall, though those of course matter a lot--as I understand it the biggest blocker to quality American walnut production is spacing. Those huge walnut trees have space to grow, and walnut trees grown under natural conditions tend to fight for sunlight. When they grow in natural distributions, they do tend to be thinner and have odd kinks in the trunk. Like you say, they're scrub trees. You can make them not be them, but it's work!

Contrast this to other hardwoods like maples or (most) oaks, which don't really care much about being relatively tightly packed. Silviculture is very much about strategizing how to grow trees in effective ways to get the outcomes you describe, and it's pretty fascinating stuff.

Spacing is indeed important, and if you are going to grow walnut on a plantation, you want to manage spacing over the first 20 years of the plantation pretty closely, with very dense competition in the early years to force straight upward growth, followed by thinning to allow space for crowns to gather enough light to maintain growth rates. You don't have to do that with most conifers, which tend to grow straight single boles regardless, but you do with most other North American hardwoods, including timber maples, and most species of oak.

You can't make Ikea-style furniture out of high-quality wood: particle board is FAR higher quality than real wood. Quality is a synonym for consistency (not luxury), and particle board is far more consistent than real wood. Most importantly, particle board is dimensionally stable. This is why even high-end furniture uses a lot of plywood. Real wood has horrible dimensional stability: it warps as humidity levels change. That would never work with Ikea-style furniture.

If you wanted to make Ikea-style furniture with higher-end materials than particle-board, you'd use Baltic Birch plywood, and certainly not solid Walnut.

I think you mean plywood, not particle board. Very different things. Particle board is crap.

You can also construct with hardwoods in a way that prevents warping and cupping, like using rift sawn cuts and orthogonal grain joiniery. It’s not some secret, this is taught in woodworking 101.

I’ve built a lot of my own furniture with hardwoods and none of it has warped in a decade.

>You can also construct with hardwoods in a way that prevents warping and cupping, like using rift sawn cuts and orthogonal grain joiniery.

No, you can't. Not if you're making IKEA furniture that customers assemble themselves.

>I think you mean plywood, not particle board. Very different things. Particle board is crap.

No, it's not, if you're making inexpensive furniture that customers self-assemble. Good plywood is very expensive.

>I’ve built a lot of my own furniture with hardwoods and none of it has warped in a decade.

Great, let's see you make something that way that ships in a flat box, and which some idiot can put together with pictogram instructions using no tools except a screwdriver for turning cam-lock fasteners.

>Great, let's see you make something that way that ships in a flat box, and which some idiot can put together with pictogram instructions using no tools except a screwdriver for turning cam-lock fasteners.

You've clearly never dealt with old furniture. Tables, chairs and beds used to be and some still are packaged and assembled in this manner. Granted they used threaded inserts instead of cam-lock stuff.

You seem to conflate "good" with "cheap"; particle board is "just" cheap, it's not good.

Plywood will be stronger, lighter, and deal better with humidity, it is "better" as material on pretty much every measure.

Plywood is far more expensive.

Good, cheap, fast: pick any two.

For the price, particle board is good.

IKEA used to ship solid wood products -- and laminated pine-strip items too -- in flat boxes.

Back in the 90s, I bought a solid wood bookshelf and a laminated pine strip coffee table from them. They were structurally sound and very durable. In fact, a couple of years ago, I repurposed the bookshelf to create a built-in.

So it's definitely do-able!

They still do this, fwiw. I have a TARVA dresser in my spare room which came unfinished. I used...probably too-expensive (for what it is) gel stain and lacquer on it and it came out pretty nice for a couple evenings' work.

A fast growing birch tree would be amazing. Baltic birch is an incredible material, I have two torsion box workbenches made of it.

Particle board may be dimensionally stable but is terrible in every other way- weak, poor water resistance and not durable. Sealing a hardwood with lacquer/sealer pretty much eliminates warping and cupping.

I hate this sort of Reddit-engineer comment where you redefine a word and then use that redefinition to back up some garbage opinion.

No, particle board is not "high quality". It has inferior mechanical and weathering properties to real wood, chip board and plywood. What particle board is is cheap enough and good enough.

properly done glued wood boards don't have a warping problem, and sometimes are even stronger than whole wooden planks. In fact most of Ikea furniture is made from those, except wardrobes and cupboards, which are not expected to have much pushes from aside.

Cat’s Cradle for the age of the PayPal mafia: this is how the world ends, not with a bang but a freeze, as superefficient photosynthesis genes inadvertently spread into the plant kingdom, cooling the earth dramatically, because — for reasons infuriatingly not discussed in the article — some brainwashed startup naïfs were able to bypass government regulations about GMOs.

Or, genetically engineered algae start releasing dimethyl sulfide into the atmosphere, leading to runaway cloud cover and cooling.

This isn't a Netflix sci-fi. A single startup is not going to diametrically reverse climate change by planting some GMO trees.

The tech seems like a small world.

> That same year, Ms. Hall, who had been working for Silicon Valley ventures like OpenAI (which was responsible for the language model ChatGPT), met her future co-founder Patrick Mellor at a climate tech conference. Mr. Mellor was researching whether trees could be engineered to produce decay-resistant wood.

Surely this can’t be true. Where I live Weyerhaeuser has crazy pines that grow faster than any normal tree you have ever seen. They cut them all down and replant at rapid rate. I know they have to be genetically modified in some way and I don’t think it is just normal breeding. My brother’s gf’s Mom worked for them sharpening the saw blades in the mills and she was telling them about them. You can see them grow when you drive by for more than a few years and it is very impressive.

This was in 1987 and they are talking about introducing genes.-

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-31-mn-9240-s...

Douglas firs grow between one and two feet a year and have for as long as people have been writing it down (in English, anyway). We've definitely gotten better at breeding fast softwoods, but we've done so through smarter silvaculture--tree positioning matters a lot, turns out--and selective breeding.

Where are we on bringing back chestnut trees with genetic engineering?

The article briefly mentions that project and how its been caught up in government regulations for years, whereas this project was somehow able to side step all that (ie in SV tradition they just ignored it).

Not exactly genetic engineering, but there's actually a huge community dedicated to bringing back the American chestnut. I participated in an orchard planting of 432 seedlings last year in MA.

https://acf.org/

The Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t podcast talked in-depth with one person on that project in 2022. In short, they have promising results, and they’re moving slowly forward.

https://www.spreaker.com/user/16676611/restoring-the-america...

I’m looking forward to planting my first Ozark Chinquapin this spring - the seedling is in my refrigerator right now, happily chillin’ out in a Ziplock baggie of moist soil.

It’s not “engineered” in the colloquial sense, though - it’s the descendant of hand-selected trees that didn’t succumb to the blight.

What could possibly go wrong

Can we slightly modify some strains and let them live in the wild? Instead of developing something new but do not let it multiply.

From the title I was really hoping this would be about the chestnut but I guess fast growing poplar is cool too...

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