Fixing the Climate Crisis by Re-engineering the Chloroplast

A limited amount of sunlight energy hits earth's plants and a limited percentage of this transforms carbon dioxide to sugar, etc. A limited response is evident by humans to the perception of eminent climatic collapse. Perhaps the easiest of these three to influence is the amount of sunlight energy converted to sugar. While about 0.5-5% of the sunlight energy hitting a leaf converts to sugars, etc., photovoltaic cells regularly convert 15% of their incident sunlight to electricity. If chloroplasts and plants could achieve 10% efficiency, it would increase the potential biomass; the potential amount of life on earth that could live sustainably, including human life.

Perhaps a virus improving the efficiency of the chloroplasts it infected, spread throughout the plant kingdom by an insect vector, could most easily enact this change.

Perhaps engineered phytoplanktons of many common marine species, photosynthesizing tenfold more efficiently, could be spread throughout the world's oceans, and grow and thrive, reducing atmospheric CO2 and increasing sealife, and thus restoring overfished fish stocks as well as marine biomass overall. If these could also fix nitrogen without iron, it would supercede yet another constraint on the biosphere, and perhaps allow earth's humans to dodge climatic collapse.

Some interesting related work.

Above illustration from The Function of the Aerenchyma in Arborescent Lycopsids: Evidence of an Unfamiliar Metabolic Strategy

by

Walton A. Green

from Peace and Permanance by E.F. Schumacher

"In short, we can say today that man is far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom. No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. The assertion that "foul is useful and fair is not" is the antithesis of wisdom. The hope that the pursuit of goodness and virtue can be postponed until we have attained universal prosperity and that by the single-minded pursuit of wealth, without bothering our heads about spiritual and moral questions, we could establish peace on earth, is an unrealistic, unscientific, and irrational hope. The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science and technology was something we could get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position.
From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence....Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities. There can be "growth" toward a limited objective, but there cannot be unlimited, generalized growth...The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war."

Could seawater-flooded deserts help re-bind CO2 while supplementing fisheries?

We face sea level rise due to the climate crisis and fisheries collapse due to overfishing. Can we can address both at once by diking around coastal deserts, flooding them with the excess seawater and growing mangroves, etc. in the resulting shallow waters?

Perhaps there is an opportunity to reduce atmospheric CO2 while doing something with a lot of seawater that would otherwise flood our coastal regions, in a way that increases coastal fisheries, all while using existing technology.

Coastal deserts could be surrounded by dikes and flooded with excess seawater, like a salt water rice paddy. This would increase photosynthesis, as the shallow oceans created absorb more sunlight photosynthetically than the desert they would partly replace. It would also remove seawater from the sea, and, on a massive scale, could lessen coastal flooding from sea level rise. It could also increase fish catches sustainably, as shallow waters are typically very productive fisheries, and the increased area of shallow water created by this could be fished, and might foster intensive sustainable aquaculture, like mullet and milkfish ponds.

If windmills powered both dike creation and seawater pumping, then perhaps setting this up could be nearly carbon-neutral - once operating, the increased photosynthesis allowed would make this carbon- negative, to the extent that fixed carbon is stored, instead of re-released.

About 70% of earth's surface is ocean: http://www.noaa.gov/ocean.html About 14% of the earth's land surface is 'desert'

'Woodford' Bigflower or Yellow Vetch in June 2011

Let's shorten the work week

It's not right to leave the unlucky jobless to starve on the side of the road, when we can just shorten the work week and spread the pain a bit. We could encourage four-day work weeks by starting time-and-a-quarter overtime after 32 hours in a week, with time-and-a-half overtime after 40 hours as usual. Accompanying this with underemployment insurance from the nation or state could help preserve our society from crimes of desperation by those people otherwise left behind. A similar 'Work-Sharing' approach has been implemented in Germany, and has been widely used.
If, as a result of such a law, a half of workers had their hours shortened by a day a week, this would create jobs for about an additional 7% of us. That alone could almost eliminate official unemployment, currently at 9.1%, and make a dent on actual unemployment, which is calculate to be quite a bit larger.
In addition, this could ease the burden on social service providers, as the newly employed could care for themselves. And it would ease discrimination against minorities, as fuller employment tends to do.

John Maynard Who? Wall Street shoots own foot while wounding Economic Recovery.

What part of 'insufficient demand' doesn't Wall Street greed understand? If stimulated into employing the one of five of us now out or short of work, the US economy could rebound, further enriching fat cats while saving the unluckiest of us from an uncertain fate, which is sure to drag all of society down with us on our way there. It could rebound because so many more of us would be actually producing things that we need - we'd have more goods to share and more pay to spend at Wall Street's businesses. If these jobs are green jobs, we might wisely prepare USA for our certain future of uncertain climate and fierce global economic competition.

Not to mention that tightening banking law to guide capital from speculation into producing real value would actually help people, as opposed to just changing the digits on the GDP.

Nah. Let's just suffer stupidly instead.

Vicia grandiflora - Bigflower or Yellow Vetch

Roads and jobs.

When we leave our homes physically we usually need roads, and we often provide them for each other via our governments. All the public roads aren't used all the time, so some might argue that we have too many roads, but they are there when we need them.

When we leave our homes economically we usually need jobs. We sometimes make these one by one, employing ourselves when it suits us, and sometimes some of us make jobs as private contractors. If it got really serious and widespread, we could create jobs through our government, the way we create roads.

Isn't it just common sense? Isn't it serious now?

How can we compete as a people when one of every six of our hands is tied behind our backs? There are that many of us un- or underemployed in the USA.

Henry George's Progress and Poverty

Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_ seems a valuable contribution to economics; an overlooked jewel.

It contains the intriguing discernment that perhaps capital and labor are united in their susceptibility to the landed, and share a common interest, instead of being set against each other. In support of this, George points out that when wages drop or unemployment grows, interest rates typically plunge as well, an interesting observation.

I quibble a bit with the postulated benefits of increased population on the quality of life, which seems to conflate the effects of better technology with simple increases in population at one point. This part of his two-pronged poke at Malthusianism seems off.

The book clearly and preciently explains a powerful analysis of industrial society, with an elegant remedy. Both mindful of the wisdom of markets and the unfairness of typical industrial cities, George first details the analysis, then passionately advocates for his thoughtful 'cure'.

Overall, a very important and well-written book.

Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depression and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; the Solution (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition) (Hardcover)

Tavis Smiley interviews Van Jones

It was a great discussion, but now(May1st2011) the link is dead.

Is I = P*A*T actually I = P*a/T*H? Global sustainability via corporate dominance?

This important Ray Anderson speech envisions curative capitalism. Highly recommended.

Greg Palast on Swiss Banks, the WTO and their effort to globalize CDOs, etc., that already brought down USA finance

Link

Van Jones: Why End Disposability.