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'