Freman Dyson at NYRB

[David Morris]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494

The Question of Global Warming
By Freeman Dyson

A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies
by William Nordhaus
Yale University Press, 234 pp., $28.00

Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto
edited by Ernesto Zedillo
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization/Brookings Institution
Press, 237 pp., $26.95 (paper)

[...]
At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the
strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the
graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is
incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years.
Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the
fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what
Nordhaus meant when he mentioned "genetically engineered carbon-eating
trees" as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and
technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale
use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to
read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and
the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more
rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have "genetically
engineered carbon-eating trees" within twenty years, and almost
certainly within fifty years.

Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb
from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it
underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and
other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable
of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes
into its grasp. Keeling's wiggles prove that a big fraction of the
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of
biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world's forests were
replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the
forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for
wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by
half in about fifty years.

It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our
economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first
century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our
economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could
be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there
is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with
the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon
emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The
ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor
people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have
mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be
radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some
low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is
likely to become a reality.