3rd Industrial Revolution?

Well worth viewing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA

Air Repair via ways of least cost, waste, disruption and uncertainty.

1) The least possible cost is negative; carbon removal that is profitable independent of the carbon removed.

2) The least disruptive carbon removal methods may already escape notice.

3) The least uncertain technologies already exist and work now.

4) The least wasteful methods waste nothing while reducing earlier existing waste.

Hence let’s consider existing, profitable, efficiency-enhancing yet unnoticed carbon removal methods.

Reducing atmospheric carbon inevitably takes energy. Indeed, in storing energy, life reduced carbon, and in getting some of that energy back, we humans are oxidizing carbon.

The least disruptive energy source may well be existing sunlight already hitting earth, yet not inducing photosynthesizing much.

Two large regions now catching sunlight that don’t photosynthesize much are deserts and High-Nutrient-Low-Chlorophyll (HNLC) ocean regions.

Supply of limiting nutrients can allow greater productivity, where and when other nutrients supplied can not.

Provision of limiting nutrients to plants and/or plankton may be the greatest photo-productivity increase opportunity worldwide.

Deserts are dry due to climate. HNLC regions are unproductive due to oddities of water chemistry in oxygen-rich environs.

Deserts cover 10% of earth’s dry land, while HNLC waters stretch across 1/5th of the oceans, Dry land covers nearly 30% of earth, while water covers about 70%.

10% of 30% is 3%; 20% of 70% is 14%, 4.8-fold more, hence, opportunities for engaging sunlight energy in carbon reduction in HNLC waters may exceed those in deserts.

Are there existing unnoticed profitable activities that increase photosynthesis in HNLC waters?

Phytoplankton in HNLC waters typically photosynthesize so little because low iron levels limit their conversion of sunlight in three ways:

1) Low iron directly constrains photosynthesis, since iron irreplaceably catalyzes photosynthesis in multiple ways.

2) Ongoing iron additions to HNLC waters are tiny.

3) Iron rapidly precipitates out of oxygen-rich waters, due to surprising oddities of chemistry.

What existing profitable activity brings iron to HNLC waters without notice?

1) On the Georges Bank, a once-rich fishing region, fully 4% of these water’s iron content came to Georges Bank every year as trace iron in fishing fleet engine fuel, according to

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/georges-bank.

2) Energy output is the driving objective of fuel consumption.

3) Iron in fuel additives catalyzes more complete oxidation of fuel carbon, reducing soot while increasing energy output, in matching counterpoint to iron's catalysis of carbon reduction in photosynthesis.

4) Some iron picrate fuel additives have proven profitable by increasing energy output of marine engines.

5) FPC is a prominent iron picrate fuel additive company worldwide.

https://www.fpc1.com.

6) The world’s shipping fleet burns about 300 million tons of fuel oil each year.

7) FPC’s current fuel additive treatment levels, of 50 ppb Fe, optimize individual ship owner profitability.

8) The Redfield ratio describes marine life’s ratio of use of sea nutrients, and predicts which nutrient’s low levels will limit sea life growth. It addresses carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Sea life uses C:N:P in the ratio of 106:16:1. The original Redfield ratio has been extended to describe another limiting nutrient, namely iron, after the discovery of iron’s importance in limiting sea life. The extended Redfield ratio is still under exploration, and is estimated to be C:N:P:Fe = 106:16:1:~0.001.

9) If 300 millions tons of marine fuel oil were treated with 50 ppb iron, and a fifth of this iron fell on HNLC waters, catalyzing photo-productivity, (at an extended Redfield ratio of C:N:P:Fe = 106:16:1:0.001), this iron would induce 1.5 million tons of carbon removal from air via HNLC waters’ increased photosynthesis.

Perhaps marine fuel can be treated with higher levels of iron, to optimize, not ship owner profitability, but global carbon removal.

1) The upper acceptable limit on treated fuel’s iron content may be maintaining existing fuel ash levels in tests at about 0.01%, or 100 ppm,.

2) Increasing fuel iron content via treatment to 50 ppm, instead of 50 ppb, might increase carbon removal in HNLC waters 1,000-fold, while perhaps negligibly affecting fuel ash content.

3) Expanding fuel treatment at these higher levels to the entire worldwide shipping fleet’s fuel usage of ~300 million tons fuel oil per year might increase carbon dioxide removal in HNLC waters to 5,500 million tons; carbon removal there to 1,500 million tons, to ~4% of annual human carbon release, and to more than the current carbon release of the entire worldwide shipping fleet’s fuel usage.

1) Mapped here are shipping densities worldwide.

(http://nicolasrapp.com/shop/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/F21CHAv2-1.jpg)

 

2) “HNLC conditions occur in remote, offshore areas of the

subarctic north Pacific, subtropical equatorial Pacific, and Southern Ocean...” EldridgeML 2004: 19

3) Much shipping crosses to and from Asia and North America via‘Great Circle’ routes, between Asian manufacturing and USA consumers. Perhaps this shipping traverses the subarctic North Pacific.

4) Perhaps FPC targeting those ships traversing subarctic North Pacific waters for fuel treatment at the higher 50 ppm level would restore much carbon fixation/reduction while using existing infrastructure in profitable ways.

Industrialism or survival?

      Trump is a train wreck, but Clinton, also too bound to Wall Street, can not stop industrialism from ruining our earth. Wall St. finances most industry, and industry now eliminates too much labor using technology and too much resources. This yields unnecessary unemployment and pollution, while depleting resources and destroying our climate, and thus our food system.

      Trump is a nightmare, but Clinton awakens us not from that horrible dream. Committed to industrial finance atop the world, she too would doom earth to this ongoing climate crisis; to unneeded unemployment, and thus undue poverty spreading widely; and to expanding wars for fleeting resources, wastefully propping tottering industrial titans up for moments more, before industry, thus expanded, takes more of humanity out by it’s inevitable collapse.

      We need Dr. Stein as U.S. President. Jill understands the interlocking nature of finance, industrialism and the degradation of earth’s human habitability. She is acutely aware of the opportunities awaiting us by turning from industrial suicide to sustainable survival.

      Why choose between different flavors of apocalypse? We can quickly convert industrialism into something lasting, helpful, and just. Vote Jill.

Did our Ancestors Stumble From Night Paddocks to Grain Agriculture?

Did our ancestors stumble upon grain agriculture through paddock grazing?

Many grain crop ancestors exhibit fur-zoospory. In other words, many wild relatives of grain crops are adapted to burlike dispersal, forming spiny seedheads that tangle in livestock, etc. fur so that the seed is carried enmeshed animal’s coats to distant grounds to grow.
Night paddocks can protect herded animals from non-human predators. Burlike fur-zoospore  seed might be inadvertantly sown into night paddocks rendered fertile by livestock manure built up over the night stays of the animals.
A livestock rotation among night paddocks could induce grazing down of competitors, fertilizing with manure and seeding with large-seeded grain relatives, all to yield grain-like harvest after a seasons’ growth. Rotation among paddocks could help interrupt livestock pest and disease cycles.
Perhaps early nomadic gatherer-pastoralists noticed better wild grain relative yields where night paddocks were the year before, then tried sowing paddocks after grazing.

One way to check whether this happened is to see whether it is happening among current mixed pastoralists-agriculturalists now.

Raising Grain.

    Grain farming provides us with calories, protein, and edible oils (from oil seed crops). But the current culture of annual spring and summer grain crops, (and ‘biennial’ winter grain crops) uses lots of energy-intensive plowing and cultivating, leading to wind and water erosion of our practically irreplaceable topsoil.

    Enter the dream of perennial grains, that would yield year-after-year continuously, and catch the spring sunlight that annual grain plants are still too small and young to intercept. By catching more sunlight, perennial grains might both yield well and have energy reserves to fight off diseases and such, to survive and yield for many years. Perennial grains could also preserve soil from erosion, by leaving ground exposed by tillage less frequently, compared to annual tillage for annual grains.

    In practice, according to Rodale’s Peggy Wagoner, attempts at perennial grains have yielded either lots for a few years or little for many years.[source] This may be because of the different life strategies of massively-seed-yielding annuals versus massively-pest-resistant perennials. To explain, perennials face a longer window of disease and pest susceptibility. Their perennial life strategy is a gamble that they can do better than annuals by setting seed years from now, instead of this year (or next). To hedge their bet, they invest energy resources in preparing to fight, and actually fighting off, diseases and pests. This leaves less energy to build big seed yield in early life.

    This contrasts with heavy-yielding annual grains, which dodge much pest and disease susceptibility by going to seed quickly and completely. This uses up energy put into seed that might have otherwise been available for weathering the long multi-year windows of disease and pest susceptibility faced by perennials. Is there a reason that it has been so difficult to combine large yearly seed yields with long life? Perhaps there has been both evolution of traits valuable for either lifestyle, as well as evolution of assemblages of these traits. Please let me explain...

    DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) encodes traits in specific locations within chromosome chains. Maybe traits useful for either one lifestyle or another; either annual or perennial, have grouped into assemblages of traits which are nearby on a DNA chain, through evolution. They might tend to have evolved to be in two groups, one for each lifestyle, because plants did well with either one assemblage, say annual, or the other, perennial, but plants with mixed traits did poorly, and left relatively less mixed-trait offspring. This can explain why it’s been so difficult to combine heavy, constant yields and long life in grains.

    Is, then, the dream of having living roots continually holding soil while yielding grain year-after-year practically impossible? Is there any way to use what we have created; short-lived heavy-yielding grains and long-lived, light-yielding grains, to piece together some method that can sustain itself, while sustaining humanity?

    Masanobu Fukuoka sowed winter grain into ripening rice in autumn, then, a couple of weeks later, he harvested the rice, leaving the winter grain growing with a head-start on the weeds. Late next spring, he then sowed rice into the ripening winter grain before harvesting the winter grain, so the rice growing in the stubble also had a head-start on weeds. This model, of staggering two short-lived grains growing together to continually hold the soil, might guide us. A part of Fukuoka’s method may be hand-harvesting - heavy mechanical combines might crush the young sprouts beneath the ripe standing ready-to-harvest crop.

    Can we overlap a set of the short-lived high-yielding perennial grains that Wagoner documented, to have living roots continually holding soil, but by an ever-changing, overlapping assemblage of plants? This might yield harvests of mixed seed.

    Can we sort, after harvest, different grains mixed within the same year’s harvest, or use them mixed together? We now sort weed seed from grain commercially, so separating differently sized grains seems do-able.

    If this works, we might succeed at getting harvests of grain, while living roots continually hold grain field soil, yet without any one grain holding open a long window of susceptibility to diseases and pests.

Splitting the Difference with Somewhat-Perennial Grains



Splitting the Difference with Somewhat-Perennial Grains

    The difference being split here is between grain crops that live less than a year and long-lived crop relatives that persist over a decade. It is the difference between traditional grain crops and the perennial relatives under development for ongoing grain yields every year. The word ‘perennial’ has two meaning that contrast here; it means ‘year-after-year on an ongoing basis’ as used generally, and means ‘surviving more than a couple of years’ in a botanical sense. I accentuate this distinction because of the importance of crop relatives that ‘split the difference’ - they persist more than a couple of years, yet die out over a decade or more. But first a review of other competitive approaches.
    Most grain crops are annual or biennial. There are annual spring barley, oats, wheat and rye, as well as winter rye, barley and wheat, that can be considered biennial, as they survive a winter. After these crops ripen and are harvested, the ground is traditionally plowed and another crop sown. This kills weeds, but allows erosion of soil, as before the newly sown crop grows roots, the soil is not held in place by any living roots.
    Why not just use long-lived perennial relatives of our crops instead, as The Land Institute strives to do? Wes Jackson’s institute has striven to produce perennial grains that would yield lots of useful grain year-after-year, without yearly plowing. They’ve been cross-breeding our annual grain crops with their wild, perennial relatives, striving to combine long life with heavy yield. They hope to develop crops which yield well every year, while the living roots permanently hold the soil from eroding. But it has been difficult. They have been breeding plants for decades. While the dream of everlasting yields from one planting has drawn interest perennially, the work has been hard.
    The problem may lie in strong genetic linkages between, first, traits that we hope to combine, and second, traits that we hope to omit. We want large yields and long life. But long life provides an extended window of disease and pest susceptibility. Long-lived plants survive these long susceptibility windows by guiding energy to defense, energy that could have gone to large yields, as in our short-lived crops. Since there’s a limited amount of sunlight energy caught by any plant, there must be a choice between defense and reproduction - and this choice has been faced by our crops and their wild relatives for eons; faced for so long that clusters of these traits may have evolved to be tightly bound together, so that a plant either prepares to withstand long windows of susceptibility, or commits itself to forming lots of offspring rapidly, but not both. Breaking these genetic linkages may be the difficult challenge of The Land Institute’s approach.
    Let’s look a bit afield, for inspiration:
    1. Some varieties of biennial winter grains will not go to seed until they’ve experienced a winter, even if first planted three seasons earlier, in spring. But most crops are annuals, and die after going to seed.
    2. There are crop wild relatives that are not quite as short-lived as annuals, yet are still pioneer species adapted to large seed yields and short life spans, unlike long-lived perennials. For example barley, Hordeum vulgare, is closely related to Hordeum bulbosum, a short-lived perennial with large yields of big, heavy seed, which crosses with barley. And rye, Secale cereale has a relative, Secale montanum, that also colonizes disturbed soils for a few years, via its large seed yield of heavy seed.
    3. Farmers sometimes ‘oversow’ seed for a following crop above the previous standing crop, before harvesting the standing crop. This leaves the ‘oversown’ crop with a head-start on any weeds that start to grow after the previous crop’s harvest, if everything works out.
    4. Shingles protect an entire roof, yet each shingle is shorter than the whole roof.
    In light of these four factoids, perhaps there’s another way that splits the difference between annuals and long-lived perennials. Perhaps we can conceed long life, because what we really want is living roots always holding the soil. Could we have a constantly-changing succession of plants growing roots that protect soil over the duration, like a roof, yet with each crop itself only surviving a short portion of that time, like a roof shingle? Perhaps we can have living roots constantly holding soil, yet have those roots grow, not from one long-lived crop, but from an overlapping series of short-lived crops, growing one after another. If these crops overlap their times in the field, one crop’s roots can grow in as a previous crop’s roots die, so that soil is always held by living roots. Thus, like shingles, each crop’s life is short, yet together their roots hold soil for the duration. This is a central concept to an alternate approach that might be called ‘somewhat-perennial grains.’
    As an aside, these two wild relatives, Hordeum bulbosum and Secale montanum, share an adaptation; a means of seed dispersal. They form seedheads which get stuck, via long spiny parts, to the fur of animals that travel and distribute that seed. Fur-zoochory or animal-fur-borne dispersal of seed, allows the seed to be heavy, compared to wind-dispersed seed, and still disperse. This seed density may have been very attractive to early humans, because they could easily winnow apart heavy seed from light chaff. Perhaps early animal herders protected their flocks in night paddocks, which got grazed down, manured and seeded to these wild crop relatives via fur-zoochory. Then perhaps Hordeum species grew and set much seed, and people harvested it, liked it, understood what happened, and learned to sow to repeat this feat. In any case, fur-zoochory in crop relatives may signal usefulness in somewhat-perennial grain cultures.
    ‘Grains’ here means seed crops, and includes peas, lentils, edible vetches and chickpeas and their wild relatives, as well as flax, sunflower and the like. And as folks at The Land Institute have so ably envisioned, polycultures of somewhat-perennial grains could include:
    1. summer-adapted grasses, like sorghum, maize and millet, and their wild relatives,
    2. cool-season-adapted grasses like barley, wheat, rye and oats, and their relatives,
    3. composites, like sunflower, and relatives, and
    4. legumes like peas, lentils, vetch and chickpeas, and their relatives. These could grow together, and their seed could perhaps be separated by shape, size and density, if harvested together, or could be used together.
    In sum, some short-lived wild grain relatives (with lifespans in the single digits) might help form a more sustainable agriculture that would use plowing only rarely. These grain relatives might be over-sown into ripening crops before the earlier crop's harvest, to allow the over-sown crop a head-start over weeds. Like shingles shielding a roof, these crops together might protect soil over an extended duration, while yielding year after year, yet without any one crop presenting a long window of vulnerability to pests and disease.

Garden plot after 2015/16 winter.

Overwintered yellow vetch, Vicia grandiflora cv. 'Woodford'.

Overwintered spinach, cv. 'Giant Winter' March 16th, 2016

Foreground: Yellow Vetch. Midground: Overwintered Chicory-Endive cross. Background: Spring Crocuses. Mar 16th, 2016

Our Future After Progress

Mostly, we currently progress technically, which is dependent on industry. Industry itself depends on burning fuel carbon into air.
Because our agriculture depends on a steady climate, and increases in air's carbon alter our climate, our food system can not withstand much more carbon in our air.
So, to keep eating, we must stop burning. Hence our industrial progress must cease.

Why green jobs will abound in any green future.

Industrial humanity uses fuel and tech to eliminate labor. This approach cleverly suited a world empty of laborers and replete with fuel, mineral resources and air to pollute into. But in our current world, now emptying of fuel, mineral resources and air to carbonate, and full of workers willing to labor, we can all do better together by altering the tech we use to that which employs more of our plentiful labor and uses up less of the now-scarce fuel and resources, as well as less of the air we depended on for climatic stability. I tip my hat to Herman Daly and Hazel Henderson, from whom I learned this.

Some argue that the future holds less work and more leisure or unemployment, but this supposes industrialism somehow continues eliminating labor with resources and tech. While that has certainly predominated in the past, we know this can not continue, since resources are growing scarce. Air, into which to burn carbon, is the first limit, and our past stable climate is an early casualty of industrialism. Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide can not continue. Either industrialism will end the agriculture industrialism relies on, by altering the climatic stability farmers need; or in a green future, fuel will be used less, and labor more. Any robotic replacement of human labor would rely on industrialism’s dependence on finite resources, hence must be fleeting. The sooner we acccept the essentiality of labor in our green future, the better.

Is USA a special case? Does USA's dependence on industrial agriculture now bode slack labor tomorrow? Or can we assure the now-jobless USers of green jobs?

Climate, krill, iron, and the Southern Ocean

Half a year of humanity's fossil carbon release might be bound in an iron-nourished Southern Ocean each year, but what would the climate effect be?

Humanity causes 36.7 gigatons of carbon release into air each year, from land use, cement-making and fossil fuel burning. But if future krill trawlers went to sea, not empty, but full of iron, half that carbon could be fixed by sealife in the Southern Ocean, where the krill are caught per year. But what would happen to the carbon thus caught? Would it fall to the bottom? Would it anaerobically become methane, or induce nitrous oxide release, both worsening the climate crisis, or would it remain in sediments, halfway solving our greenhouse gas problems?

I understand China hopes to increase it's annual Antarctic krill catch 7-fold, to 2 million tons wet weight[8]. This krill catch would, at 28 micrograms iron per gram of krill dry weight[3], and at 20%dry weight:wet weight[5] contain 11.2 tons of iron.

The projected Chinese krill catch, ten-fold existing catches, would be from wild standing stock of ~0.5 billion tons[2], which might contain 2,800 tons Fe[3,4]. Since 1/4 of the krill's range's Fe[1] is in the krill, there could be a total krill range iron content of 11,200 tons. So taking 11.2 tons/year from this would reduce total Fe in range by ~0.1%.

Let's say those trawlers carried 2 million tons of ferrous sulfate heptahydrate from China's iron works to the Southern Ocean's' krill pastures in otherwise empty holds, and spread it evenly as they caught their krill each year. This would contain, at an Fe:S:O4:H14:O7 ratio of 56:32:64:14:112, about 1/5th Fe, or 0.4 million tons Fe.

With krill containing 1gram Fe for every 355 grams P and at Redfield's ratio of 106C:16N:1P , every ton of Fe ending up in krill would temporarily bind 1 x 355 x 106 = approximately 37,630 tons of carbon. So (37,630 x 0.4 million tons x 1/4 of the range's iron being in krill [1], the year's iron supplied by the fleet could fix ~3.8 billion tons of atmospheric carbon temporarily, in living krill, with an additional 11.3 billion tons of carbon in phytoplankton or dissolved. Summed up, 15 gigatons of carbon per year might be fixed, which is about half the fossil fuel carbon emitted per year.

But would all that iron be taken up by Southern Ocean sealife? The Southern Ocean is 20.3 million square kilometers[6], about 4% of Earth's total surface area of 510 millionsq. km. This ocean's productivity is iron limited; It is a part of the 
1/5th of the world's oceanic area limited by iron. Experimental addition of iron
to the Southern Ocean resulted in vastly increased photosynthesis[7]. I'm still 
pursuing the effects on sealife.

But if half the carbon temporarily fixed became methane and a fifth of that returned as methane to the atmosphere, with 72 times the warming potential effect of CO2 over two decades (1/2  x 1/5 x 72 =7.2), the carbon as methane would increase heat trapped by about seven times. We need to know the fate of that carbon.


1    NicoiS 2010 'Southern Ocean fertilization by...'
2    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_krill
3    LocarninaSJP 1995 'Trace element concentrations in Antarctic Krill, Euphausia superba'
     Locarnina reports Fe content of 28 micrograms/gram fresh weight, and 9.94 milligrams P per gram, for an P:Fe ration of 355P:1Fe.
4    Partly derived from an estimate within JenningsS, KaiserH, ReynoldsJD; _Marine Fisheries Biology_, John Wiley & Sons 2009 :34 "..if krill wet weight is 10% carbon(Morrill et al 1988, Ikeda & Kirkwood 1989)..."
5   Approximate average from Table 1, RaymontJEG 1971 'The biochemical composition of Euphausia superba'
6    06/30/15 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/oo.html
7    BarberRT 'SOFeX: Southern Ocean Iron Experiments. An Overview of the Biological Responses.
8    http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-03/04/content_19716649.htm

Dear Bill Gates: On high taxes not stopping high growth.

The "highest economic growth decade was the 1960s. Income tax rates were 90 percent."  

— Bill Gates on Sunday, May 17th, 2015 in an interview on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS"

In sum: While true, there's no longer any room on earth for such growth, if the growth is real. If it's not real growth, then it's just inflation, which won't help. We need to separate economic health from economic growth. Growth promises equality, but never delivers. We need to enforce fair markets and anti-trust law to head toward equality.

skrilledcheese

Could you expand on your point a little? I admittedly know little about the subject, and this seems like an interesting point.

On this, I'm echoing Dr. Herman Daly, ex-World Bank economist and co-author of the textbook Ecological Economics. His Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE)'s website is a good place to start on this: steadystate.org, as are the writings of Hazel Henderson, and John Michael Greer.
Seven plus billion of us live now on our planet, depending on it for our food and more (fiber, ores, etc.) With so many of us, our dependence is degrading our earth's ability to provide 'tomorrow' what it yielded 'yesterday'. For example abusive ag.'s soil erosion degrades future crop yields. We're running out of resources, including room to pollute, while we're increasing in number of willing workers.
Those before us, in a world empty of workers but full of resources, figured ways to eliminate labor using resources and technology. Yet in today's world, full of workers but emptying of resources, we still idolize LABOR efficiency, when what suits our present circumstances is RESOURCE efficiency.
Economists among us idolize economic growth as politically-acceptable panecea for inequality. There's growth in population and per capita income growth, but there's nowhere to put any of this growth on our earth. We can't fit infinite growth on our finite earth, even per person growth in income, because if the income growth is real, it means more resources extracted and used.
Meanwhile, the effort to increase equality has been thought of as a way for the rich to acceed to the demands of poor, so it is thus a 'reason' for growth. Yet, equality has been progressively receding away over our horizon even as we clamor, through growth, toward that horizon.
So since growth doesn't fit earth today, and won't deliver equality, how do we cope with that and Piketty's insight that capital returns exceed growth rates throughout history? How do we deal with the frightening cries about poverty that stress us all? Measures of well-being in societies with great inequality are on average worse than more equal societies, according to the thoroughly researched Wilkerson and Picketts' The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. Further, how do we make opportunity fairly available to each child, as demands the meritocracy that we aspire to be, and philosophically lean on as rationale?
We should, at least, drop suicidal oil exploration subsidies, for example. We should, at least, face ourselves 'at the pump' with the true pollution costs of the gasoline energy we use to eliminate labor.
We should, at least, charge 'at the pump' for the inevitable degradation of the now polluted commons we all suffer in, rich and poor alike, when we as spenders chose to eliminate labor with use of resources that pollute when used. Also, we should at least recognize that the value of market share, as distinct from pure 'economies of scale', is monopolist's money, unfairly gotten. We should, at least, extend legal protection, conveyed now in the form of ‘common carrier’ law, to small and minority retail consumers, to the wholesale markets as well, as in Maryland’s law that small hospitals can’t be paid less for the same procedure than larger hospitals are otherwise able to negotiate, with market share’s clout, when dealing with health insurance companies.
Here in Boston, this should take the wind out of the hospital ‘consolidation’ drive. It should also, in opposing fashion, squeeze the breeze on health insurance conglomeration as well. It should take the profit out of market domination by large market share buyers of small market share sellers, for example, as well as by large market share sellers squeezing small market share buyers.

A False Dilemma: Economic Efficiency vs. Equality

"Equality and efficiency are often thought to be in a zero-sum relationship: the more we have of one, the less we have of the other (18). Many policy issues therefore take the form of debating what is the best 'mix' of equality and efficiency, or how much of what we currently have in one dimension we should give up in order to obtain more in the other dimension. Tax and welfare policy are two areas where the belief in a trade-off is strongest. Since there are good reasons to think the relationship between equality and efficiency is not zero-sum, it is worth summarizing the 'logic' of the trade-off view.There are three 'reasons' why efficiency and equality are thought to be in a trade-off. The first and foremost is the motivation argument. It holds that equality eliminates the differential rewards necessary to motivate people to be productive. Any move toward equalization of incomes - such as through welfare grants, progressive taxation, or restructuring of wages - 'will' reduce individual effort, personal savings and eventually, the level of productive investment a society can generate. The motivation argument goes back at least as far as Reverend Malthus's eighteenth-century treatise on poverty, in which he postulated that the stimulus of providing for oneself and bettering one's condition in life is necessary to 'overcome the natural indolence of mankind' . Thus, greater equality through income redistribution to the poor would necessarily lead to less work and lower production.(19)
The second 'reason' for the trade-off is that to maintain equality, government must continually interfere with individual choices about how to use resources, and in doing so, it curbs useful experimentation and productive innovation. One element of this innovation argument is that the more we have a policy of equality, the larger the government bureauocracy has to be. and the larger the bureaucracy, the more inflexible it is likely to be. In large organizations, innovators tend to be suppressed (20).



The third 'reason' is the waste argument. To maintain equality 'requires' a large administrative machinery that uses up resources but is not itself productive. The admnistrative machinery of equality - tax bureaus, welfare agencies, labor departments and the judicial apparatus for resolving conflicts generated by these entities - represent an 'actual' loss of valued resources. The labor, buildings, computer and paper thus used could go to producing other things. Arther Okun dramatized this argument with his metaphor of a leaky bucket: any redistributive policy is like carrying money from rich to poor in a leaky bucket. The policy question for Okun is how much waste one will tolerate before deciding it is not worth engaging in transfer at all.
The motivation argument is familiar from the great debate about equity. If you do not accept need as the primary motivator, if you believe people work also for the inherent satisfaction of the sense of belonging, then you will probably not be terribly convinced by the argument here. But the most important critique of of the motivation theory comes from another corner. Even if people are motivated by need and by the desire to increase differences of status and wealth between themselves and others, such enormous differences as we currently have are not necessary to sustain motivation. We could move in the direction of more equality without sacrificing efficiency. ... Some redistribution ... obviously does not halt experimentation and innovation. If it did, tax and welfare systems would have long ago killed the American economy, not to mention the West European and Japanese economies. Of course, we can always wonder what marvelous innovations might have happened had the last tax dollar not been extracted, but then, we can also wonder what marvelous innovation might have happened had the next tax dollar gone to finance education or basic research.
Neither is it clear that administrative machinery is wasteful. In the first place, to call something 'administrative' rather than 'productive' is to win the argument by sheer rhetoric. But more importantly, administrative machinery employs people, integrates them in a social group, and gives them dignity, if it accomplishes nothing else. In a society that stakes personal worth on paid employment but cannot provide employment for everyone, that is no small contribution. And finally, the administrative machinery necessary for equity is arguably no less productive, no less useful to soceity than some of the innovations spawned by the pursuit of profit – hula hoops and pet rocks, fruit loops and fruity pebbles, gold fingernails and green hair. Hula hoops may indeed contribute to both individual and social welfare, if only because they, too, provide jobs, but one would be hard put to say that they contribute more than a government agency.
The mos telling evidence against an immutable equality/efficiency trade-off comes from cross-national studies. Japan has very high taxes on capital, steeply progressive taxes on personal income, fairly high inheritance taxes and very low taxes on consumption(such as sales taxes). Yet it has one of the highest rates of personal savings in the world, is a leader in technological innovation, and leads the industrial countries in productivity growth. West Germany has high corporate taxes, a generous pension system, a comprehensive universal health insurance system, and a far more equal distribution of income than does the United States.
As Robert Kuttner has shown, there are many different ways of reconciling equality with economic performance. There are many ways a society can go about providing economic security, collecting taxes, maintaining full employment, stimulating investment, promoting economic development and distributing income. These are political choices. Where Labor is well-organized and shares significant political power, where in other words there is someone to “articulate the self-interest of the nonrich” economic policies tend to reconcile equality with efficiency. The idea that the two are incompatible is a politically useful myth for the rich and powerful(22).



_Policy Paradox and Political Reason_ , Deborah Stone, Harper-Collins 1988.

[In Sum: ‘Economic Equality or Efficiency' is a false dilemma, often justified in three ways:
1) Needed to 'overcome the natural indolence of mankind'(Malthus) False
2) ‘Needs intrusive gov’t., which stifles innovation.’ False
3)  ‘Needs big gov’t., which is wasteful’ False]

18: The idea of a trade-off between these two policy goals was popularized by Arthur Okun's Godkin Lectures, published under the title _Equality and Efficiency: the Big Tradeoff_ (Wash. D.C.: Brookings Inst. 1975)

19  T. R. Malthus, _An Essay on the Principle of Population_, Anthony Flew, Ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 :245

20  This is one of Okun's arguements, and it seems to be the one that most convinces him of a zero-sum relationship. See Okun op. cit. (note 18):56-60

21 Lester Thurow, _The Zero-Sum Society_(NY, Basic Books, 1980):201-202

22 Robert Kuttner, _The Economic Illusion: False Choices between Prosperty and Justice_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984):267

Short version - Out of the Frying Pan, into the Freezer

    Cold. O'Ness buttoned up his tweed jacket and reached for that warming mug, quietly burping as he pondered in a University of British Columbia research building in Vancouver , under-equipped for the Pacific Northwest snow. Sudden in earth's history, in human lives the cold was year by decade chilling.
    How had Earth become less like Venus and more like Mars? Somehow the proverbial journey 'Out of the frying pan into the fire' didn't happen for earth, despite humanity's vast fossil fuel consumption, and Tadhg was chasing down why. Some things were obvious, including the now-accepted central role of air's carbon in the sudden warming of the earlier climate crisis. Where had so much of air's carbon gone? Plants were curiously darker now and grew faster, almost all of them. O'Ness put down the cup and rubbed his temples. Salmon harvests had inexplicably rebounded vastly, even while harvesting decimated returning spawners. Much of what had been infertile ocean turned greener as plankton grew where little had grown before. So much had changed.
    The routine salmon fry surveys started by the boffins before him allowed comparison with his current work. Comparing these showed that sockeye salmon juvenile's spleen became darker about the same time that the seas seemed to become greener. But how could these be correlated, and what caused these? O'Ness pushed the computer mouse away and sighed, got up from his squeaky chair, closed doors and walked through snowy streets, home to wife, kids and dinner.
    As he opened home's door, aromas of salmon and potato wafted out, and two children ran up cheering. Later, the meal done, O'Ness pushed back his creaking chair. As he and the kids washed up after the meal, he told them tales of life before, when humanity accelerated right at certain death without blinking, by burning so much fuel that the ice melted. They didn't really follow the carbon-in-air link in that chain yet, but give them time. In their beds, the children fell asleep, and O'Ness returned to pondering.
    Geoengineering concepts usually involved shading earth to lessen warming, but as we eat the sun's energy as our food, less sunlight reaching earth would have starved some of the 7 billion people then alive by shading crops, reducing food crop yields. Hence the earth shading concepts were thought shelved. Yet the earth was cooling. Were sulfate aerosols secretly spread in the stratosphere via a contrail conspiracy, shading earth? There was one way to tell; measure current levels of sunlight at the planetary surface. This revealed that the sunlight now reaching through the atmosphere was still as strong as before the cooling.
    His wife came up to him.
“I want a divorce.”
    Reeling, Tadhg sat down. “Why?”
“You don't really love me, nor do you care about our children.”
“That's not true. Why do you say that?”
“You walk in a daze through this house, never really seeing anyone else, never really looking at us.”
“I've just been preoccupied with work.”
“I've had enough, I want you out.”
“Honey, I work so hard because I love you, Ben and Sally, and I've just had a breakthrough in the work. That's why I've been so preoccupied. Now the hard part of the work starts; nailing down the details and getting the word out. If this works like it should, we'll earn more, and Ben and Sally will live in a world that isn't so cold. I need your support now more than ever. Please, Don't end this now, for our family and for the world.”
“Cut the crap. Pack your stuff and get out by next week. Until then, sleep on the couch. ”
    Tadhg was far too upset to sleep, couch or no couch. He went angrily back to campus and stayed awake all night working. He was in top form teaching his first class. He didn't even take it out on the students, much. Then he went to the gym and pulled his back out. Tadhg hobbled through the showering and back to the office.
    Leaving the office for the day, Prof. O'Ness hobbled slowly, his back jolting him with pain  when his feet slipped suddenly on ice. Where to? He ate on campus in a cafeteria and inquired after rooms to stay in. Finding none, Tadhg returned home, collected a change of clothes and trundled off to a hotel for the night. Latching the hotel room door brought much-needed shelter. Tadhg sighed.
    Tadhg returned to the office in the morning and searched listings for a room near campus.  Graduate students sharing apartments had rooms available; Tadhg picked one that seemed quiet and not too far from home and campus.
    Tadhg gingerly shuffled home again, avoiding back twinges. He met a friend and colleague, Ned, to help move suitcases to the new room. At the old house, his children Ben and Sally looked at him. He sat down with them, briefly explaining the situation that they'd surely heard before, as Ned moved bedding and suitcases to a car.
    At a restaurant, later, Tadhg didn't dare drink alcohol; he would teach class in the morning, and also feared numbing what he was still trying to understand, despite the temptation. Ned shared news from the Biochemistry Department.
    “They've found that while the darkening of the plants coincided with no apparent nuclear DNA change, it did correlate with a DNA change in the chloroplast.”
    To Tadhg, the news was like a balm; the tale of the DNA change calmed him. While recent events didn't make much sense, at least here was an area where sense still seemed useful. Ned dropped Tadhg at the apartment, brought the suitcases and bedding in, then, before driving off, gripped Tadhg's shoulder once, which only twinged Tadhg's sore back a bit.
---------------------------------
    “Consolidated Fish Feed is purchased, Dr. Inouye.” Phoebe Inouye's agent Sheneilla Overburg had just signed the purchase agreement on a controlling interest in the last major salmon fry feed maker that Phoebe didn't already own.
    “Thank you, Ms. Overburg.”
     Phoebe thus assembled, in one year, a veiled colossus. By using agents like Overburg and off-shore shell corporations to buy each fish feed company, no one but her knew of her stake in the salmon feed market. So started the stage in which the typical quasi-monopolist would start to squeeze both suppliers and buyers, using the clout of 'market-share' to financially bludgeon in both directions. Inouye, an ichthyologist-turned-businesswoman, was fishing for a different catch. After she acquired control of the fry feed plants, she altered the sockeye feed composition to include more trace iron. But how could this pay off the massive debt Dr. Inouye incurred?
***Sidebar A: Oceanic iron, The Aleutian Eruption and the Following Salmon Onslaught. ***
    Oceans are remarkably diffuse in iron, with concentrations so low that even rare vanadium is more prevalent. Iron averages as low as 75 nanomoles per cubic meter in much of the North Pacific, or about 4 kilograms per cubic kilometer of seawater there. The wind has blown 98% of oceanic iron there to the ocean as dust from deserts such as the Gobi, upwind of the North Pacific. The reason iron is so scarce in surface waters is that it easily forms insoluble precipitates that fall like snow to the ocean floor.
    Why does this matter? Because phytoplankton use iron as a co-factor in enzymatically transforming nitrogen, including cyanobacteria's nitrogen fixation (from dissolved air's nitrogen gas) – and because nitrogen constrains ocean photosynthesis by phytoplankton in much of the world's oceans. This limiting iron flow historically limits the North Pacific's overall productivity severely, along with other vast HNLC oceanic areas - HNLC stands for 'high nitrogen – low chlorophyll'. This fifth of the oceans has enough fixed dissolved nitrogen to nourish more plankton, yet these areas remain low in planktonic chlorophyll, revealing that plankton lack something besides nitrogen. This puzzled early oceanographers, until iron was found to be the limiting nutrient in most of these areas.
    In 2008 an Aleutian island volcano eruption fed plankton downwind, changing  blue seas green in the months following the eruption by depositing ash containing iron across the Northeast Pacific Ocean.
http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/ash_cloud_2008.jpg
http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/Phyto_distn_2007.jpg
http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/Phyto_distn_2008.jpg
    This plankton bloom preceded a sudden population explosion in the pink salmon population that returned to land during 2009. And the 2010 sockeye salmon return was also unexpectedly large. Pink salmon return two years after they enter the ocean as young fry, while sockeyes return about three years after they enter the sea. The trace iron that the volcano added to the salmon feeding waters, by causing the plankton blooms, nourished these massive returns of salmon.
    Another way to get iron to those ocean pastures might be within the sockeye salmon already heading that way to feed, by loading their spleens with iron stores before they leave shore, within the hatcheries, by feeding iron-enriched feed. Why in sockeye salmon? While pink salmon fry head to sea right after hatching, feeding negligibly in fresh water streams, sockeye salmon fry spend a year feeding in fresh water before venturing to sea. Hatchery sockeye fry might be fed iron during this year. Since iron is so critically rare in the ocean, it makes sense to expect that sockeye salmon fry have adapted to sequester iron in their spleens for adult use. Natural dispersion of these stores, over the three years of sockeye salmon presence in these oceanic pastures, could supply the critical iron, inducing phytoplankton blooms that in turn nourish the same sockeyes and the rest of the sea life, too.
-----------
    Amidst the entire industrial spending spree, Phoebe had sold long puts on wild salmon delivery futures, promising to sell salmon in the future at prices set today. She thus gambled in her own field, where she had inside knowledge, and now, inside power.
    A year later pink salmon returned from ocean pastures rendered fertile by the supply of the one nutrient missing; iron, brought via sockeye spleen. Salmon returned in record numbers to a fish-starved market. But Dr. Inouye's counterparts in the salmon futures market, by agreeing to buy Phoebe's long puts at earlier, then-prevailing high prices, had bet that the salmon supply would continue as tight as before Phoebe's veiled iron supplementation started. Beforehand, too many trawlers chased too few fish, so thinking that this would continue seemed sensible. The 'put' buyers, that Phoebe contracted with, bet with what seemed like an optimistic fool; they lost and she gained by filling those earlier contracts to deliver, at high earlier prices, with what now flooded the market; plentiful and cheap wild salmon.
     There had been oddly productive years of salmon returns before, but as peaks in a downward-sloping yield-by-year line. So those who bet once with Phoebe and lost in the futures market, bet again the next year, never knowing that they were dealing with the same person, or that Phoebe held the cards.
-----------------------------
    The next morning Tadhg hobbled through class, then calculated the influence that the darkening of the plants might have on atmospheric carbon levels and flows. Calculating carbon fixed by the increase in growth in plants darkened worldwide, and in air's carbon fixed subsequently, O'Ness still couldn't explain the steadily dropping air carbon levels. Where had the rest of the air's carbon gone?
    He headed back to the new flat, picking up a simple to go meal on the way. Tadhg called home and reached his son Ben.
    “How was school, Ben?”
    “OK. We studied the same old stuff; multiplication”
    “Multiplication? I use that all the time.”
    “You do?”
    “Yeah, today I used it to look into why it keeps getting colder. It might have to do with plants being darker now.”
    “Oh. What was it like before?”
    “Plants were mostly greenish, instead of being nearly black. In the country, apart from in winter, everything was green.”
    “Why is it different now?”
    “We're still finding out, Ben.”
    Tadhg talked with Sally too, then slept. In the morning at school he explored publishing a letter jointly with the plant scientists in Biochemistry, and with a climatology boffin as well, on this proposal to account for missing atmospheric carbon via the darkening of the plants.
***Sidebar B:
    Plants use chloroplasts to catch light and make sugar and stuff. Chloroplasts are captured  remnants of independent bacteria engulfed by early eukaryotes and then integrated within the eukaryotic cells, that thus became the first plants. Chloroplasts retain just a bit of their ancestor's DNA molecules, since most of their free-living ancestor's DNA shifted over to the plant nucleus. The chloroplasts use their DNA in conjunction with the plants' nuclear DNA to form the enzymes with which light is caught and sugar, etc. made. But the light caught is not all the light encountered – much green light bounces off chloroplasts. This is why plants look green. Chloroplasts basically ceased evolving independently after their engulfment by the first plants.
    http://biology.mcgill.ca/phytotron/lightwkshp1994/1.1%20Geiger/Fig%20Gei%202.jpg
Green light contains about a fifth of the sunlight energy reaching earth's surface. Outside of plants, algae and microbes have evolved to use green light in addition to red and blue light. But these microbes were not the ones that the first plants engulfed, so plants still basically use only red and blue light. They use this light to pump electrons and protons across the insulating cell membrane in the 'Light' reactions, then, in the 'Dark' reactions, use the returning of those protons to power making sugar, etc. from air's carbon dioxide.
    A photon flew from the sun. Eight minutes later, half of it's fellow companion photons were absorbed or reflected within earth's atmosphere, but this one made it through. It wobbled with a frequency near 560 terahertz, travelling with a wavelength of 535 nanometers; it was green. It hit a molecule of proteorhodopsin and was absorbed, which knocked a proton across the thylakoid membrane into thylakoid space. This complemented the chlorophyll and carotenoid liberation of protons within thylakoid space. Both sources of protons powered the formation of ATP as the photons returned to the stroma through ATP synthase, mounted in the thylakoid membrane.
    Through the happenstance of accidental evolution's stumbling along in the dark, plants hit on sugar-making 'Dark' reactions with notable inefficiencies. When oxygen, instead of carbon dioxide, reacts with 'RuBisCO', an enormous photosynthesis enzyme central to the dark reactions, glyoxylate forms. Mopping that glyoxylate up takes considerable cellular energy. A few microbes, like Chloroflexus, have evolved an alternate enzymatic pathway using oxygen-insensitive enzymes. The pathway avoids glyoxylate buildup, and is characterized by it's 3-hydroxypropionate intermediate, and is hence called the 3-HOP pathway. While the Chloroflexus genus organisms do incidentally produce glyoxylate, they efficiently metabolize it.
    Atop a German charcoal-making pile grew a Streptomyces like no other known – in this warm, carbon-rich aerobic environs it alone fixed nitrogen at near-ambient temperatures and thrived, by virtue of an oxygen-tolerant nitrogenase, who's encoding DNA was almost lost with the loss of the organism in a lab mishap.
    In nano-injection, DNA is electrostatically stuck to a positively charged microscopic lance, which, jammed into the chloroplast, released that DNA to transform the chloroplast once the electrostatic charge is reversed. This nano-injection and the nitrogenase mentioned above also feature in our story, to which let's now return.
    --------
    After a few rings, Tadhg heard a mechanical voice announcing “Central Satellite Imaging Service.” Tadhg pressed the extension mentioned in the letter in his hand.
    “Samir here.”
    “Hi, Samir, This is Tadhg O'Ness from U.B.C. following up after your recent response.”
    “Oh, Hi Tadhg, How can I help?”
    “I just wanted to check on your production schedule for the ocean chlorophyll data.”
    “Tadhg, It looks like it will be two weeks before we can get to your order.”
    “Thanks, Samir, If there are any issues, please do contact me.”
    “Will do, Tadhg. Is that it?
    “Yes, Samir, and it was good to talk with you in person.”
    “Thanks, Tadhg, and likewise. Have a good day.”
    Tadhg turned to the mail of the day; a letter from his wife's lawyer. Ugh.
-------------
    Decades earlier, William Jackson desperately scoured the microbial photosynthesis literature for ways to improve photosynthesis and plant growth, to bind air's troublesome carbon increase. He was obsessed with trying to ameliorate the climate crisis, and why not? He had time, ambition, good intentions and maybe a little psychosis, so it seemed possible to overcome his lack of high academic status or significant capital. As a son of biology department faculty, he had some access to tools and lab materials, and that might be all he needed. He recognized the opportunity; nearly a fifth of sunlight reaching earth went unused by plants - mostly green light. Sure, some green light was utilized, especially lower in the canopy, but much was lost. In plants of that era the 'Light' reactions missed out on much of green light's considerable power, and the 'Dark' reactions were inefficient when leaves were hot. Furthermore, fossil fuel price hikes had boosted nitrogen fertilizer prices worldwide, at a time when over a quarter of the world's population ate due to the crop yields dependent on that artificial nitrogen fertility. William sought to change all that by engineering a viroid to bring three microbial pathways to plants; first, a rhodopsin that powered cell growth with green light; second, the improved oxygen-  and heat-tolerant 'Dark' pathway called '3-HOP'; and third, Streptomyces' oxygen-tolerant nitrogenase to fix nitrogen from air for the plant.
    William finally nano-injected chloroplasts with the darkening viroid, then introduced the aphids into the growth chamber. Will the darkening spread within the plant? Will the viroid also infect the aphids? Will the aphids spread any viroid to the experimental plants?
    There was a knock on William's basement laboratory door, then a crash of splitting wood as men in white coats kicked the door in. They stumbled rapidly through the breach and grabbed William as he turned from the growth chamber. William's hands were torn from the isolation glovebox. In the confusion, the crudely built glovebox fell off the counter. It's light wooden frame broke and the plastic film panels tore. Soil mix and plants tumbled into a heap, and infected aphids flew through the eddies of air. As the men dragged William out the open cellar door, William realized with shock that the aphids were free in the world, and the viroid with them.
    Months went by slowly in the asylum for the now-drugged William, but through the window one day he noticed plants outside becoming darker, he thought. Maybe it's just the light that day. Bemused, William wondered groggily whether earth's plants were darkening with proteorhodopsins; whether the engineered nitrogenase and 3-HOP pathways worked.
    After a decade, in which the darkening of the plants took hold outside of Williams' window, William was transferred to a less restrictive facility, where he learned through his old college buddy of Tadhg's interest in plant darkening. William wrote O'Ness, and awaited a reply.
--------------------
    At Prof. O'Ness's office, Tadhg's phone rung.
    “Professor O'Ness?”
    “Speaking.”
    “This is Sally and Ben's principal. Your daughter's gotten into fights again, which this time also involved your son. Unfortunately we've had to suspend both of them for three days.”
    “Oh. I guess I should come by and pick them up.”
    “There's no need – your wife is coming. I just wanted to let you know.”
    “Well, thank you, and sorry for the trouble.”
    Tadhg turned back to calculating estimations of the additional carbon fixed through the darkening of the plants. He also wrote colleagues, arguing for further fish spleen studies. Colleague comments came back about how difficult this change in salmon fry iron transport would be.  Tadhg invited alternate explanations and pleaded that others look into fish iron flux budgets, especially salmon's.  Tadhg had data backing up increased iron transport by sockeye salmon, and was asking others to gather more. Besides, he wasn't arguing that these transformations were easy, or likely, he was arguing that they were done.
***Sidebar C:
    Much coastal desert area might be converted by dikes to keep seawater, not out, but in. This could flood extensive desert areas, which could bloom with aquaculture, incidently fixing carbon into sealife and seashell carbonates. Vast windmill farms might ring these coastal deserts, pumping seawater up and over dike after dike, into the deserts. Above each dike would lie a pond; within each pond the seawater would grow saltier via evaporation, - the farthest ponds, as saltpans, would churn out salt by the railcar-load. Before the final ponds an additional band of windmills could split water into hydrogen gas and hydroxide. which could precipitate magnesia in these penultimate ponds. The magnesia produced could become cement of a type that uses MgOH2 instead of CaOH2. Using this cement would avoid the carbon released during conventional cement preparation, an energy-intensive high-temperature process.
    Coastal deserts are often beside upwelling zones, where arctic-cold and relatively fertile deep ocean waters are drawn to the surface. With the addition of even more fertility within the dams, this dammed seawater could support vigorous plankton and algae growth. The algae could be food types like kelp, and the abundant plankton might feed edible fish. While the deep ocean's surface is often very unproductive due to lack of nutrients, shallow waters are typically hundreds of times more productive. People could insure such productivity in this seawater-flooded coastal desert aquaculture.
    --------
    The telephone rang again.
    “Doctor O'Ness, It's Central Satellite Imagery Service calling. Would you care for, in addition to the chlorophyll change data covering the sea, data covering the recently diked coastal desert areas?”
    “Oh, yes indeed. That'd be wonderful. Thank you. When will this all be available?”
    “It'll take a bit longer to include the diked desert data. Probably two weeks from now.”
    “That long. Well, I'm eager for the data, and will be waiting. Thanks.”
    A week later, Prof. O'Ness stood before the college tenure committee, sweating and quaking a bit.
    “Tadhg, you haven't published for years now. The college ratings give us little choice...”
    “Samuel, I'm gathering final data for a significant article that ought to be accepted within months.”
    “That's all well and good, but if the department's tenured faculty publications per year drops below the number of faculty, the entire department is at risk of being axed. We can't afford to risk that, so we're not granting your tenure request now, but we will put it on hold, and will reactivate it if publications are accepted.”
    Tadhg's stomach twisted.
    A week later, back at the office, Tadhg dialed the young journal's editor, who answers in person after quite a few rings.
    “Betty Travois speaking.”
    “Ms. Travois, This is Professor O'Ness again of the University of British Columbia.”
    “Yes, Professor,”
    “I'm calling you about a draft article which I emailed to your firm earlier.”
    “Professor O'Ness, we've received the piece, but without further data, I'm unwilling to take reviewer's time with it.”
    “I understand, and hope to have the data in and analyzed by next week.”
    “Good. Let's talk then.” Click.
    “Central Satellite Imagery Service. If you know your party's extension...”.
    Tadhg gets through Samir.
    “Samir, Is there any chance the data on chlorophyll within HNLC areas and diked deserts is ready yet?”
    “Tadhg, I'm sorry, It will probably be a week more. There's quite a few projects in the pipeline.”
    After hanging up, Tadhg started to wonder about other greenhouse gases that he might be able to get data on more rapidly, like methane. Then Tadgh found Joseph Fosjocki's old article on transforming cattle salivary glands to excrete alpha-galatosidase.
***Sidebar D: 
    In 1995  livestock emitted seventy eight million tons of methane from within both their guts and manure, from organisms capable of digesting galactose oligosaccharides using the alpha-galactosidase enzyme. These oligosaccharide sugars are built by legumes. The ancestors of mammals somehow lost the ability to digest these eons ago, with climate-scale effects. While methane over a century has 35 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide, over two decades it has 85 times carbon dioxide's effect, according to the 2013 IPCC reports. A mumps-like viroid might be engineered to implant a transgene into cattle salivary gland cells, to secrete alpha-galactosidase in saliva, so oligosaccharide sugars like raffinose and stachyose are digested and utilized by livestock for additional growth, before hindgut microbes can make methane from them.
    -----------
     Two decades earlier, Joey Fosjocki completed the assembly of a mutated mumps virus designed by Joey to induce salivary gland secretion of alpha-galactosidase in cattle, so cattle could start digesting oligosaccharides from legumes directly. Then his lip itched, so he thoughtlessly reached around his face guard and scratched it with the gloved hand he'd been working with. 'I really should get lip balm' he thought, 'on my way home', licking his lip. He ate a late lunch, and finished off other work the rest of the week, then on Friday sneezed all the way home on the subway. By a week after the Monday exposure date, his cheeks ached, and the next week was painful, but soon afterwards he could eat beans without gas. The same fate befell those near him on the subway, and soon the world's people could eat beans without bubbles, and cattle of the world grew more rapidly and passed much, much less methane gas. But Joey's company couldn't sell what the world got for free, whether the world wanted it or not, so the company folded, closing it's doors for good. Joey was out of work.
----------
    Tadhg scribbled on the back of yet another envelope, his fingers chilled. The Vancouver cold exceeded the building's heating capacity, which had been designed for a milder climate. Still not enough cooling accounted for, even with gasless cattle and people. What else had changed air's carbon?
    ***Sidebar E:
    Some grain sorghum varieties might replace much rice in tropical paddy fields since they cook like rice and yield more, but there's prejudice for rice over sorghum, which is known as 'poor man's rice'.
    Grain sorghum might be developed to use Gluconacetobacter  to fix nitrogen inside the plants, as was discovered occurring in Brazil inside the stems of sorghum's close relative, sugarcane.
    A reduction in methane release to air might follow from the switch, in many flooded pond fields, or 'paddies', from growing rice to sorghum. When grown in flooded soils, sugarcane induced a more than ten-fold reduction in 'paddy' soil methane release, by altering the redox state in the pond field's rhizosphere. This might reduce 'paddy' methane emission worldwide by 50 billion tons of methane per year, while the grain sorghum's greater yields would increase food yields. We seven billion humans might appreciate that, especially considering that many of us eat today thanks to artificial nitrogen fertilizing, who's energy cost, by releasing carbon, threatens the climate-dependent agriculture it fertilizes.
----------
    The short half-life of atmospheric methane and it's enormous impact on global climate within a twenty year period, Tadhg realized, made it particularly likely as a cause of the recent cooling. Tadhg thought slowly as he ate an Indian meal at a nearby restaurant. Then he stopped, looking at the meal. The grain was the newly prominent, yet quite ancient grain sorghum that cooked like rice. Perhaps here was another clue to climatic change. Back at the office, O'Ness scoured Pubmed, then the entire internet for works on altered paddy methane emissions, and found Dwivedi's 1980s article on sorghum's close relative, sugarcane, in paddy fields and it's effects on methane emissions as compared with rice. Luckily the rice-to-sorghum conversion data were quicker to get than the satellite data.
    Checking his email, Tadhg came across the satellite data, finally in from the satellite service. O'Ness began a flurry of analysis, plugging satellite data into spreadsheets and programs he'd prepared.  The transfer of data went as planned, so soon the cumulative greenhouse gas changes from sockeye's iron shuttling, plant darkening, increased aquaculture via diked deserts, magnesium-based cement substitution, gasless cattle (and people) and sorghum adoptation in ex-rice paddies were tallied. The combined effects succeeded in explaining the cooling of earth.
    Tadhg called his wife. O'Ness and his wife set a date to meet with the divorce lawyers.
    For a change of pace, Tadhg glanced at the backed-up campus mail. He noticed William's letter from the asylum.
    “Dear Professor O'Ness,
    I understand that you are estimating the climatic effect of plant darkening. You might be curious to know how this occurred......Anyhow, if you do discover an effect, I hope you will document it's source, and the sanity of the effort, given the then-prevalent overheating of earth. This might help free me from the asylum.”
    Tadhg replied, asking William to go on the record with the aphid viroid work.
    Later, Tadhg opened the paper as he ate lunch and found reports of Phoebe Inoue sued for price-fixing with her now-revealed near-monopoly. Overburg had came forward with suspicions of cornering the fish feed market, stimulating an investigation that showed the conglomerate Phoebe hid for so long. Now Tadhg had the agent of the sockeye spleen darkening documented too and a motive for the iron addition. Also in the paper was the tale of the mumps epidemic of some years ago. Joey Fosjocki's work was revealed, and his professional life ended, but for Tadhg, the article added background depth for his article. He worked all night, then sent the results to the journal editor.
    Betty liked what she saw and sent the piece out to peer reviewers.
    Then...
From: Betty Travois, Syndicated Science Publications
To: Prof. Tadhg O'Ness
Subject: Congrats, the last reviewer approved!
Body: Tadhg, your article's been accepted for publication, and will in fact lead a special issue on earth's surprising recent cooling...
    After the department tenure ceremony, back in his office, Tadgh discovered his mug. Picking up the leftover black coffee, he glanced at his family photo. His wife gone, the children in limbo, mostly now out of his reach, Tadgh sipped a bitter, cold victory cup.

"Valuation of research as intangible capital in agriculture can be measured by quantifying the impact of research on changes in asset values. This study examines the valuation of research as intangible capital in agriculture using Tobin's q theory. Both public and private research capital have been highly valued in U.S. agriculture. Using four different approaches, each $1 of public research capital had an average value that was 8.59 times higher than $1 of tangible capital or conventional assets such as real estate, vehicles, machinery and livestock. Private research capital was valued 5.2 times higher than tangible assets. Since the rate of return on conventional assets averaged 4.9% over the 1950-1991 period, the valuation price indicates that the rate of return on [public] research would be 40.4%." from Abstract, 'Valuation of intangible capital in agriculture' White FC, _J._Ag._and_Applied_Economics_27_(2):437 1995

"...bias against agriculture has resulted in lower rates of return on  investment in other economic sectors. In a survey of about 1,650 public-sector investment projects, for example, the rate of return averaged 11.5% in nations with a strong bias against agriculture and 18% where the bias was moderate or low. Rates of return on private-sector projects in these two classes of nations were 13 and 16 percent, respectively." Erlich PR _The Stork and The Plow_, citing Dasgupta 1993 [within] Schiff M, Voldez A, _The plundering of agriculture in developing countries_ Wash DC 1993

After Growth, Economic Maturity?

1. More exponential physical growth of industrial humanity can't fit on our finite planet – we already use more than earth can sustainably provide by about half.
2. Economic growth with physical growth won't fit on our one earth.
3. Economic growth without physical growth is a mirage. It is just inflation, a zero-sum game that may alter the score but can't make the system better overall.
4. In organisms growth often precedes or leads to maturity. 
5. Economic maturity remains conceptually underexplored. 
6. What guidelines would well manage economic maturity?

From Frying Pan to Freezer

    Professor O'Ness pawed through yet another sockeye salmon juvenile on the dissecting tray. He cut a sample from the spleen, and transferred it to a waiting microtube in ice. This last sample finished off getting enough for statistical significance in the experimental struggles. Did fish spleens in ocean-bound sockeye juveniles suddenly increase in iron content some years before? Tadhg O'Ness spent hours testing iron content of all the spleen samples, then washed his hands and returned to his office. Maybe this work will finally lead, though publication, to tenure, which has eluded Tadhg, unlike middle age.
    Cold. Sudden in earth's history, in human lives it was year by decade chilling, in general, unrelenting overall, except for small variance by year. O'Ness bundled tighter in his tweed jacket and reached for that warming mug, quietly burping as he pondered in a University of British Columbia research building in Vancouver , under-equipped for the Pacific Northwest snow, brought by the  surprisingly cooling climate. How had Earth become less like Venus and more like Mars? Where had so much of air's carbon gone? Somehow the proverbial journey 'Out of the frying pan into the fire' didn't happen for earth, despite humanity's vast fossil fuel consumption, and Tadhg was chasing down why. Some things were obvious, including the now-accepted central role of air's carbon in the earlier climate crisis's sudden warming. Plants were curiously darker now and grew faster, almost all of them. O'Ness put down the cup and rubbed his temples. Salmon harvests had inexplicably rebounded vastly, even while harvesting decimated returning spawners. Much of what had been infertile ocean areas turned greener as plankton grew where little had grown before.
    The routine salmon fry surveys started by the boffins before him allowed comparison with his current work, which showed that sockeye salmon juvenile's spleen became darker about the same time that the seas seemed to become greener. But how could these be correlated, and what caused these? Was sockeye spleen iron the key to greener waters and lowered atmospheric carbon? Tadhg calculated, but the carbon estimation totals couldn't explain all the carbon fixation on earth now. There must be more puzzle pieces still missing. O'Ness pushed the computer mouse away and sighed, got up from his squeaky chair, closed doors and walked through snowy streets, home to wife, kids and dinner.
***Sidebar A: Oceanic iron, The Aleutian Eruption and the Following Salmon Onslaught.
    Oceans are remarkably diffuse in iron, with concentrations so low that even rare vanadium is more prevalent. Iron averages as low as 75 nanomoles per cubic meter in much of the North Pacific, or about 4 kilograms per cubic kilometer of seawater there. The wind has blown 98% of oceanic iron to the ocean as dust from deserts such as the Gobi, upwind of the North Pacific. The reason iron is so scarce in surface waters is that it easily forms insoluble precipitates that fall like snow to the ocean floor.
    Why does this matter? Because phytoplankton use iron as a co-factor in enzymatically transforming nitrogen, including cyanobacteria's nitrogen fixation (from dissolved air's nitrogen gas) – and because nitrogen constrains ocean photosynthesis by phytoplankton in much of the world's oceans. This limiting iron flow historically limits the North Pacific's overall productivity severely, along with other vast HNLC oceanic areas - HNLC stands for 'high nitrogen – low chlorophyll'. This fifth of the oceans has enough fixed dissolved nitrogen to nourish more plankton, yet these areas remain low in planktonic chlorophyll, showing that plankton lack something besides nitrogen. This puzzled early oceanographers, until iron was found to be the limiting nutrient in most of these areas.
    In 2008 an Aleutian island volcano eruption fed plankton downwind of the Aleuts, changing  blue seas green in the months following the eruption by depositing ash containing iron across the Northeast Pacific Ocean.
http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/ash_cloud_2008.jpg
http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/Phyto_distn_2007.jpg
http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/Phyto_distn_2008.jpg
    This plankton bloom preceded a sudden population explosion in the pink salmon population that returned to land during 2009. And the 2010 sockeye salmon return was also unexpectedly large. Pink salmon return two years after they enter the ocean as young fry, while sockeyes return about three years after they enter the sea. The trace iron that the volcano added to the salmon feeding waters caused the plankton blooms that nourished these massive returns of salmon.
    Another way to get iron to those ocean pastures might be within the sockeye salmon already heading that way to feed, by loading their spleens with iron stores before they leave shore, within the hatcheries, by feeding iron-enriched feed. Why in sockeye salmon? Pink salmon fry head to sea right after hatching, feeding negligibly in fresh water streams, but sockeye salmon fry spend a year feeding in fresh water before venturing to sea. Hatchery sockeye can be fed iron during this year. Since iron is so critically rare in the ocean, it makes sense to expect that sockeye salmon fry have adapted to sequester iron in their spleens for adult use. Natural dispersion of these stores, over the three years of sockeye salmon presence in these oceanic pastures, would supply the critical iron, inducing phytoplankton blooms that in turn nourish the same sockeyes and the rest of the sea life, too.
----------- End Sidebar***
As he opened home's door, aromas of salmon and potato wafted out, and two children ran up cheering. Later, the meal done, O'Ness pushed back his creaking chair. As he and the kids washed up after the meal, he told them tales of life before, when humanity accelerated right at certain death without blinking, by burning so much fuel that the ice melted. They didn't really follow the carbon-in-air link in that chain yet, but give them time. In their beds, the children fell asleep, and O'Ness returned to pondering.
    There had been discussion of geoengineering before, he'd read. This concept usually involved shading the warming earth to lessen the temperature change, but as we eat the sun's energy as our food, less sunlight reaching earth might have starved some of the 7 billion people then alive by shading crops, reducing yields. Hence the earth shading concepts were thought shelved. Yet the earth was cooling. Were sulfate aerosols secretly spread in the stratosphere via a contrail conspiracy, shading earth? There was one way to tell; measure current levels of sunlight getting through the atmosphere to the planetary surface. This revealed that sunlight reaching sea level was still at the same watts per square meter as before the cooling. Tadhg wondered, since there was no measurable shading of earth's sunlight, and since the salmon moving more iron to sea wasn't enough to force the cooling, what was forcing the cooling?
    His wife came up to him.
“I want a divorce.”
    Reeling, Tadhg sat down. “Why?”
“You don't really love me, nor do you care about our children.”
“That's not true. Why do you say that?”
“You walk in a daze through this house, never really seeing anyone else, never really looking at us.”
“I've just been preoccupied with work.”
“I've had enough, I want you out.”
“Honey, I work so hard because I love you, Ben and Sally, and I've just had a breakthrough in the work. That's why I've been so preoccupied. Now the hard part of the work starts; nailing down the details and getting the word out. If this works like it should, we'll earn more, and Ben and Sally will live in a world that isn't so cold. I need your support now more than ever. Please, Don't end this now, for our family and for the world.”
“Cut the crap. Pack your stuff and get out by next week. Until then, sleep on the couch. ”
    Tadhg was far too upset to sleep, couch or no couch. He went angrily back to campus and stayed awake all night working. He was in top form teaching his first class. He didn't even take it out on the students, much. Then he went to the gym and pulled his back out exercising. Tadhg hobbled through the showering and back to the office.
    Leaving the office for the day, Prof. O'Ness shuffled slowly, his back jolting him with pain occasionally when his feet slipped suddenly on ice. Where to? He ate on campus in a cafeteria and inquired after rooms to stay in. Finding none, Tadhg returned home, collected a change of clothes and trundled off to a hotel for the night. He felt attacked on many quarters, but was tired enough so that locking the hotel room door sheltered him enough that he could finally sleep.
    Tadhg returned to the office in the morning and searched listings for a room near campus.  Graduate students who shared apartments had rooms available; Tadhg picked one that seemed quiet and not too far from home and campus.
    Tadhg gingerly shuffled home again, avoiding back twinges. He met a friend and colleague, Ned, who had agreed to help move suitcases to the new room. Once at the old house, his children Ben and Sally looked at him. He sat down with them, briefly explaining the situation that they'd surely heard before, as Ned moved bedding and suitcases to a car.
    At a restaurant, later, Tadhg didn't dare drink alcohol; he would teach class in the morning, and also feared numbing what he was still trying to understand, despite the temptation. Ned shared news from the Biochemistry Department.
    “They've found that while the darkening of the plants coincided with no apparent nuclear DNA change, it did correlate with a DNA change in the chloroplast.”
    To Tadhg, the DNA story was like a balm; the tale of the DNA change calmed him. While recent events didn't make much sense, at least here was an area where sense still seemed useful. Ned dropped Tadhg at the apartment, brought the suitcases and bedding in, then, before driving off, gripped Tadhg's shoulder once, which only twinged Tadhg's sore back a bit.
    “Consolidated Fish Feed is purchased, Dr. Inouye.” Phoebe Inouye's agent Sheneilla Overburg had just signed the purchase agreement on a controlling interest in the last major salmon fry feed maker that Phoebe didn't already own.
    “Thank you, Ms. Overburg.”
     Phoebe thus assembled, in one year, a veiled colossus. By using different agents, like Overburg, and off-shore shell corporations to buy each fish feed company, no one but her knew of her stake in the salmon market, or of the junk-bond-like financing she incurred to make it all real. So started the stage in which the typical quasi-monopolist would start to squeeze both suppliers and buyers, using the clout of 'market-share' to financially bludgeon in both directions. Inouye, an ichthyologist-turned-businesswoman, was fishing for a different catch. After she acquired control of the fry feed plants, she altered the sockeye feed composition to include more trace iron. But how could this pay off the massive debt Dr. Inouye incurred?
    Amidst the entire industrial spending spree, Phoebe had sold long puts on wild salmon delivery futures, promising to sell salmon in the future at prices set today. She thus gambled in her own field, where she had inside knowledge, and now, inside power.
    A year later pink salmon returned from ocean pastures rendered fertile by the supply of the one nutrient missing; iron, brought via sockeye spleen. Salmon returned in record numbers to a fish-starved market. But Dr. Inouye's counterparts in the salmon futures market, by agreeing to buy at earlier, then-prevailing high prices, had bet with their purchases of Phoebe's long puts, that the salmon supply would continue as tight as before Phoebe's veiled iron supplementation started. Beforehand, too many trawlers chased too few fish, so thinking that this would continue seemed sensible. The put buyers that Phoebe contracted with had made a bet with what seemed like an optimistic fool; they lost, she gained by filling those earlier contracts to deliver, at high earlier prices, what now flooded the market; plentiful and cheap wild salmon.
     There had been oddly productive years of salmon returns before, but as peaks in a downward-sloping yield line. So those who bet once with Phoebe and lost in the futures market, bet again the next year, never knowing that they were dealing with the same person, or that Phoebe held the cards.
    The next morning Tadhg hobbled through class, then calculated the influence that the darkening of the plants might have on atmospheric carbon levels and flows. Combining the carbon fixation from salmon fry carrying more iron to sea with the plant darkening's increase in growth, and in air's carbon fixed, O'Ness still couldn't explain the steadily dropping air carbon levels. Where had the rest of the air's carbon gone?
    He headed back to the new flat, picking up a simple to go meal on the way. Tadhg called home and reached his son Ben.
    “How was school, Ben?”
    “OK. We studied the same old stuff; algebra”
    “Algebra? I use that all the time.”
    “You do?”
    “Yeah, today I used it to look into why it keeps getting colder. It might have to do with plants being darker now.”
    “Oh. What was it like before?”
    “Plants were mostly greenish, instead of being nearly black. In the country, apart from in winter, everything was green.”
    “Why is it different now?”
    “We're still finding out, Ben.”
    Tadhg talked with Sally too, then slept. In the morning at school he explored publishing a letter jointly with the plant scientists in Biochemistry, and with a climatology boffin as well, on this two-pronged proposal to account for missing atmospheric carbon. He also wrote email messages to colleagues, arguing for further fish spleen studies. Comments came back via email from colleagues about how difficult this change in salmon fry iron transport would be.  Tadhg invited alternate explanations and pleaded that others look into fish iron flux budgets, especially salmon's.  Tadhg had data backing up increased iron transport by sockeye salmon, and was asking others to gather more. Besides, he wasn't arguing that these transformations were easy, or likely, he was arguing that they were done.
    After a few rings, Tadhg heard a mechanical voice announcing “Central Satellite Imaging Service.” Tadhg pressed the extension mentioned in the letter in his hand.
    “Betty here.”
    “Hi, Betty, This is Tadhg O'Ness from U.B.C. following up a letter you responded to recently.”
    “Oh, Hi Tadhg, How can I help?”
    “I just wanted to check on your production schedule for the ocean chlorophyll data.”
    “Tadhg, It looks like it will be two weeks before we can get to your order.”
    “Thanks, Betty, If there are any issues, please do contact me.”
    “Will do, Tadhg. Is that it?
    “Yes, Betty, and it was good to talk with you in person.”
    “Thanks, Tadhg, and likewise. Have a good day.”
    Tadhg turned to the mail of the day, in which was a letter from his wife's lawyer. Ugh.
***Sidebar B:
    Plants use chloroplasts to catch light and make sugar and stuff. Chloroplasts are captured  remnants of independent bacteria engulfed by early eucaryotes and then integrated within the eucaryotic cells, that thus became the first plants. Chloroplasts retain just a bit of their ancestor's DNA molecules, although most of their free-living ancestor's DNA had shifted over to the plant nucleus. The chloroplasts use their DNA in conjunction with the plants' nuclear DNA to form the enzymes with which light is caught and sugar, etc. made. But the light caught is not all the light encountered – much green light bounces off chloroplasts, which basically ceased evolving independently after their engulfment by the first plants. Green light contains about a fifth of the sunlight energy reaching earth's surface.
    http://biology.mcgill.ca/phytotron/lightwkshp1994/1.1%20Geiger/Fig%20Gei%202.jpg
Outside of plants, algae and microbes have evolved to use green light. But these microbes were not the ones that the first plants engulfed, so plants still basically use only red and blue light. They use this light to pump electrons and protons across the insulating cell membrane in the 'Light' reactions, then, in the 'Dark' reactions, use the returning of those protons to power making sugar, etc. from air's carbon dioxide.
    A photon flew from the sun. Eight minutes later, half of it's fellow companion photons were absorbed or reflected within earth's atmosphere, but this one made it through. It wobbled with a frequency of 560 terahertz, travelling with a wavelength of 535 nanometers; it was green. It hit a molecule of proteorhodopsin and was absorbed, which knocked a proton across the thylakoid membrane into thylakoid space. This complemented the chlorophyll and carotenoids liberation of protons within the thylakoid space by splitting water. Both sources of protons powered the formation of ATP as it returned to the stroma through ATP synthase, mounted in the thylakoid membrane.
    Through the happenstance of accidental evolution's stumbling along in the dark, plants hit on sugar-making 'Dark' reactions with notable inefficiencies. Glyoxylate accumulates when oxygen, instead of carbon dioxide, reacts with RuBisCO, an enormous photosynthesis enzyme central to the dark reactions. Mopping that glyoxylate up takes considerable cellular energy. A few microbes, notably of the Chloroflexus genus, have evolved an alternate enzymatic pathway using oxygen-insensitive enzymes, characterized by it's 3-hydroxypropionate intermediate, and hence called the 3-HOP pathway, which avoided glyoxylate buildup. While they incidentally produce glyoxylate, they quickly metabolize it.
    Let's talk with an ATP named Adam, ringside, as he prepares to enter the 3-HOP pathway.
    “Hi Adam, how do you feel about this one?”
    “Well, Howard, I feel pretty good. It's not like the dangerous Calvin cycle, where an oxygen can mess you up, and you end up just making a two-carbon phosphoglycolate that merely becomes glyoxylate, Howard. You see, the 3-HOP bicycle's enzymes are oxygen tolerant, so I'll just shoot right through and help form pyruvate, with the able help of my four ATP teammates, of course.
    Well, good luck Adam, not that you'll need it for this one. We'll look for you after the event.”
    “Thanks Howard,”
    “Now back to you, Fred.”
    “OK, Thanks Howard, and now the event begins, as Adam sidles into the ring(s), forming the five-member ATP team. And their off, moving with that deceptive Brownian motion toward the 3-HOP enzymes, while two carbon dioxides dissolve, forming two bicarbonate ions. These are joined by two acetyl-CoA molecules and two of Adams' ATP teammates on the approach to the first enzyme, acetyl CoA carboxylase. And they're though, those CoAs are malonylated, but what a cost! Adam's first two team-mates look pretty roughed up. Over to you, Howard.”
    “Thanks, Fred. How do you guys feel?”
    “(inaudible) tired, Howard.”
    “You both look pretty dephosphorylated, guys. Back to you, Fred.”
    “OK, Howard, Now the two malonyl-CoAs are approaching the second enzyme, along with 4,  count'em FOUR, NADPHs. Wow, that's an impressive energetic line-up.”
    “Wham, Fred, they're through the malonyl-CoA reductase enzymatic reaction, and jettisoned are two CoA molecules, as two hydroxypropionates step forward...”
    “Those two are 3-hydroxypropionates, Howard. Now the two CoAs are rejoining the action, along with two NADPH, and, yes, there are two of Adam's ATP team-mates stepping up to the propionyl-CoA synthase. And when the dust settles, two propionyl-CoA are headed in two different directions, Howard, but those ATPs are doubly dephosphorylated all the way down to being adenine monophosphates. Whew. But let's follow this propionyl-CoA, as he's joined by a bicarbonate ion and..., Why, it's Adam himself, as they all approach propionyl CoA carboxylase. OK, they're done, and a methylmalonyl CoA steps forth. Let's go down to Howard, ringside, to chat with Adam.”
    “Well, Adam, How'd it go today?”
    “Like clockwork, Howard, not that it's easy. I feel...I feel...dephosphorylated, to be honest. I'm headed for the showers.”
    “Adam, we understand, and thanks for taking the time to talk with use. Back to you, Fred.”
    “Thanks, Howard. Now methylmalonyl CoA heads toward methylmalonyl CoA epimerase, then to L-methylmalonyl CoA mutase, and out of that fray comes the familiar Succinyl-CoA, of TCA cycle fame.  Now this could go two ways, right, Howard?”
    “That's right, Fred. Succinyl-CoA can go left into that TCA cycle in which...”
    “Wait, Howard, he's going right, toward the enzyme called succinyl CoA - malyl CoA transferase, liberating CoA.  Now the succinate's going into succinate dehydrogenase, Then to fumarate hydratase, yielding malate, which combines with CoA within ...  Howard, that's our old friend succinyl CoA/malyl CoA transferase again.”
    “Whew, a bifunctional enzyme, Fred. Amazing. Now malyl CoA hits the lyase.”
    That's right, Howard. That's malyl/methylmalyl/citramalyl lyase, Howard, a real metabolic powerhouse.”
    “OK, now out from lyase comes a glyoxylate careening into the air and... Well, it's the familiar acetyl-CoA again, Fred.”
    Howard, we'll return to that glyoxylate in a minute. Let's get back to the action.”
    Thanks, Fred. Now the acetyl CoA joins with another acetyl CoA and enters... Why it's right where we started!”
    “That's right, Howard. Now let's cut back to that flying glyoxylate.”
    “ OK, Fred, the glyoxylate's fallen beside that other propionyl CoA from earlier in the cycle, and... Hey, they've re-entered the lyase, and out comes methylmalyl CoA, heading toward methylmalyl CoA dehydratase, from which comes mesaconyl-C1 CoA, which transferase makes into mesaconyl-C4 CoA, which in turn mesaconyl-C4 CoA hydratase forms into citramalyl CoA. Now that amazing tri-functional lyase steps in, forming the other original acetyl CoA and the whole goal of this process, a three-carbon pyruvate.”
    “That's the big prize, Howard. And thus end our enzymatic ringside coverage, folks.”
    Atop a German charcoal-making pile grew a Streptomyces like no other known – in this warm, carbon-rich aerobic environs it alone fixed nitrogen at near-ambient temperatures and thrived, by virtue of an oxygen-tolerant nitrogenase, who's encoding DNA was almost lost with the loss of the organism in a lab mishap.
    In nanoinjection, DNA is electrostatically stuck to a positively charged microscopic lance, which, jammed into the chloroplast, released that DNA to transform the chloroplast once the electrostatic charge is reversed.
    -------- End Sidebar***
    Decades earlier, William Jackson desperately scoured the microbial photosynthesis literature for ways to improve photosynthesis and plant growth, in earlier times, to bind air's troublesome carbon increase. He was obsessed with trying to ameliorate the climate crisis, and why not? He had time, ambition, good intentions and maybe a little psychosis, so it seemed possible to overcome his lack of high academic status or significant capital. As a son of a biology department faculty member, he had some access to tools and a tiny bit of lab materials, and that might be all he needed. He recognized the opportunity; nearly a fifth of sunlight reaching earth went unused by plants - mostly green light. Sure, some green light was utilized, especially lower in the canopy, but much was lost. In plants of that era the 'Light' reactions missed out on much of green light's considerable power, and the 'Dark' reactions were inefficient when leaves were hot. Furthermore, fossil fuel price hikes had boosted nitrogen fertilizer prices worldwide, at a time when over a quarter of the world's population ate at all thanks to the crop yields dependent on that artificial nitrogen fertility. William sought to change all that by engineering a viroid to bring three microbial pathways to plants; first, a rhodopsin that powered cell growth with  green light; second, the  improved oxygen-  and heat-tolerant 'Dark' pathway called '3-HOP'; third, an oxygen-tolerant nitrogenase.
    William hastened to finally nanoinject chloroplasts with the darkening viroid, then introduced the aphids into the growth chamber. Will the darkening spread within the plant? Will the viroid also infect the aphids? Will the aphids spread any viroid to the experimental plants?
    There was a knock on the basement laboratory door, then a crash of splitting wood as the whitecoats kick the door in. They stumbled rapidly through the breach and grabbed William as he turned from the growth chamber. William had his hands torn from the isolation glovebox. In the confusion they knocked the crudely built growth chamber right off the counter. It's light wooden frame broke and the plastic film panels tore. Soil mix and plants tumbled into a heap, and infected aphids flew through the eddies of air out into the world. As the whitecoats drag William out the cellar door, leaving it open, William realized with shock that the aphids are free and the viroid with them. The process might have begun.
    Months go by slowly in the asylum for the now-drugged William, but through the window one day he noticed plants outside becoming darker, he thinks. Maybe it's just the light that day. Drugged and bemused, William wondered groggily whether earth's plants are darkening with proteorhodopsins, whether the engineered nitrogenase and 3-HOP pathways work.
    After many years, in which the darkening takes hold outside of Williams' window, William was transferred to a less restrictive facility, where he learned through his old college buddy of Tadhg's interest into plant darkening. William is allowed to write to O'Ness, and now awaits a reply.
    At Prof. O'Ness's office, Tadhg's phone rings.
    “Professor O'Ness?”
    “Speaking.”
    “This is Sally and Ben's principal. Your daughter's gotten into fights again, which this time also involved your son. Unfortunately we've had to suspend both of them for three days.”
    “Oh. I guess I should come by and pick them up.”
    “There's no need – your wife is coming. I just wanted to let you know.”
    “Well, thank you, and sorry for the trouble.”
    Tadhg turned back to calculating estimations of the additional carbon fixed through the darkening of the plants.
***Sidebar C:
    The vision: Much coastal desert area might be converted by dikes, not to keep seawater out, but to keep it in. This damming might flood extensive desert areas, which could bloom with aquaculture, incidently fixing carbon as sealife and as seashell carbonates. the shallow ocean waters could host much greater productivity and amounts of life than the deserts beforehand. Vast windmill farms might ring coastal deserts, pumping seawater up and over dike after dike, into the deserts. Above each dike would lie a pond; within each pond the seawater would grow saltier via evaporation, - the farthest ponds would be saltpans churning out salt by the railcar-load. Before the final ponds an additional band of windmills might split water into hydrogen and the hydroxide which precipitates magnesium in these penultimate ponds. The magnesium produced becomes cement of a type that uses MgOH2 instead of CaOH2. Using this cement avoids the carbon released during conventional cement preparation, an energy-intensive high-temperature process.
    Coastal deserts are often beside upwelling ocean waters, which are arctic-cold and relatively fertile. With the addition of even more fertility within the dams, this dammed seawater could support vigorous plankton and algae growth. The algae could itself be food types, and the nourishing plankton might feed edible fish. While the deep ocean is often very unproductive due to lack of nutrients, shallow waters are hundreds of times more productive. People could insure such productivity happened in seawater-flooded coastal desert aquaculture.
    Another carbon removal effect could occur as a side effect of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion installations in the hot tropical oceans.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed/data/ms2/photo/alternative-energy/otec/OTEC-ResourceMap2009-1290x860.jpg
    These OTEC machines use the difference in temperature between hot tropical surface waters and frigid deep ocean water to drive generation of power, fresh water and ice, but their biggest financial boon comes from the fertility of the cold deep water, which fertilizes mariculture worth sixty times the energy yield of these OTEC plants in the plant outflow at the sunlit surface of the fertile deep water brought into the sun by the OTEC plants. The Mist-Lift OTEC design is not well-known, yet it was devised in the 1970s. It worked with smaller heat differences between hot surface and cold deep water than other OTEC designs, so this extended the OTEC plant use to the limits of the hot tropics' warm ocean water's range.
http://www.brianhorst.com/OTEC/Mist_Lift_OTEC_Concept_files/shapeimage_2.png
http://www.makai.com/image/mist_lift_lg.jpg
    In this 'Mist-Lift' design a partial vacuum is drawn in an enormous hollow chamber, which is about a hundred meters tall. At the bottom of the chamber 22 degree Celcius tropical surface waters are drawn in, where they burst through mist nozzles into 'steam', forced into water vapor by the vacuum. The vapor roars upward in the vacuum chamber, drawing with it droplets as a mist, all at about 18 Celcius, cooled and driven upward by the vapor expansion. Then ocean deep water, naturally near 4 Celcius, is drawn into the chamber's midpoint through mist nozzles as well, where its cold temperature condenses the warm vapor of the mist, but it doesn't eliminate the upward movement of this water, resulting in an upward stream of water at about 11 Celcius. The expansion of the warm tropical surface water vaporization powers the lifting of all that ocean water, warm and cold, to the top of the chamber, where it percolates up and over a rim into the last smaller chamber. There, huge vacuum pumps, by continually removing uncondensable gases that were dissolved in the seawater drawn into the OTEC plant, establish both of the chambers' vacuum levels. While these pumps, and the pumps lifting the cold deep water, require vast amounts of energy, the OTEC plant makes that energy and more, in that the 11 Celcius outflow from the last chamber's top has been lifted a considerable height in its initial expansion, flight, and later condensation. By falling back through a turbine, the outflow supplies more than enough power for drawing the vacuum and raising the cold deep water. These OTEC plants were built on ships deployed in the hot tropical oceans worldwide. As valuable as their power output was in isolated tropical areas, the mariculture nourished by the deep fertile water outflow from these plants would be worth 60 times that. Some of the increase in sunlight transformed by the mariculture's photosynthesis might be lost back to the deep ocean as bound carbon, and to seashell formation as carbonates, all removed from the air dissolved in the ocean's surface.
    The orangeite deposits in which diamonds are found are 'ultrapotassic' and so alkaline that the mining wastes could absorb air's CO2 once finely ground and moistened, by forming carbonates of the original rock minerals. Use of finely ground orangeite as fertilizer also might supply potassium to soil, and thus built soil and plant life, so this can fix carbon in two ways. But orangeite deposits are rare, while ultramafic mantle rock, high in magnesium or iron oxides, while somewhat rarely protruding to the land's surface, underlie the continent's crustal rock, lie below the bottom of the oceans, and form the mantle of rock that continental crust rides on. Ultramafic rock is therefore quite common, and like orangeite, can form carbonates, looking away air's carbon dioxide. If just a little of this were ground and spread, huge amounts of carbon could be removed from air.
    -------- End Sidebar***
    The telephone rings again.
    “Doctor O'Ness, Central Satellite Imagery Service here. Would you care for, in addition to the chlorophyll change data covering the sea, data covering the recently diked coastal desert areas?”
    “Oh, yes indeed. That'd be wonderful. Thank you. When will this all be available?”
    “It'll take a bit longer to include the diked desert data. Probably a week from now.”
    “That long. Well, I'm eager for the data, and will be waiting. Thanks.”
    A week later, Prof. O'Ness stood before the college tenure committee, sweating and quaking a bit.
    “Tadhg, you haven't published for years now. The college ratings give us little choice...”
    “Samuel, I'm gathering final data for a significant article that ought to be accepted within months.”
    “That's all well and good, but if the department's tenured faculty publications per year drops below the number of faculty, the entire department is at risk of being axed. We can't afford to risk that, so we're not granting your tenure request now, but we will put it on hold, and will reactivate it if publications are accepted.”
    Tadhg's stomach twisted.
    Back at the office, Tadhg dialed the young journal's editor, who answers in person after quite a few rings.
    “Betty Travois speaking.”
    “Ms. Travois, This is Professor O'Ness again of the University of British Columbia.”
    “Yes, Professor,”
    “I'm calling you about a draft article which I emailed to your firm earlier.”
    “Prof. O'Ness, we've received the piece, but without further data, I'm unwilling to take reviewer's time with it.”
    “I understand, and hope to have the data in and analyzed by next week.”
    “Good. Let's talk then.” Click.
    “Central Satellite Imagery Service. If you know your party's extension...”.
    Tadhg gets through to his contact there, Samir.
    “Samir, Is there any chance the data on chlorophyll within HNLC areas and diked deserts is ready yet?”
    “Tadhg, I'm sorry, It will probably be a week more. There's quite a few projects in the pipeline.”
    After hanging up, Tadhg started to wonder about other greenhouse gases that he might be able to get data on more rapidly, and thinks specifically of methane. Tadhg found Joseph Fosjocki's old article on transforming cattle salivary glands to produce alpha-galatosidase.
***Sidebar D:
    About 1995,  livestock produced about seventy eight million tons of methane per year, produced within their guts and manure by organisms capable of digesting galactose oligosaccharides by using alpha-galactosidase. These galactose oligosaccharide sugars are built by legumes. The ancestors of mammals somehow lost the ability to digest these oligosaccharides eons ago, with climate-scale effects. While methane over a century has about 35 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide, over twenty years it has about 85 times carbon dioxide's effect, according to the 2013 IPCC reports. A mumps-like viroid might be engineered to implant a transgene into salivary gland cells, to secrete alpha-galactosidase in saliva, so oligosaccharide sugars like raffinose, stachyose and etc. are digested and utilized by cattle, etc. for additional growth before hindgut microbes can make methane from them.
    ----------- End Sidebar***
     Two decades earlier, Joseph Fosjocki completed the assembly of a mutated mumps virus designed by Joey to induce salivary gland secretion of alpha-galactosidase in cattle, so cattle could start digesting oligosaccharides from legumes directly. Then his lip itched, so he scratched it with the gloved hand he'd been working with. 'I really should get lip balm' he thought, 'on my way home', licking his lip. He ate a late lunch, and finished off other work the rest of the week, then on Friday sneezed all the way home on the subway. By a week from the Monday exposure date his cheeks ached, and the next week was painful, but soon afterwards he could eat rice and beans without gas. The same fate befell those near him on the subway, and soon the world's people could eat beans without gas, and cattle of the world grew more rapidly and passed much, much less gas. Joey's company couldn't sell what the world got for free, whether the world wanted it or not, so the company folded, closing it's doors for good. Joey was out of work.
    Tadhg scribbles on the back of yet another envelope, his fingers chilled. The Vancouver cold exceeded the building's heating capacity, which had been designed for a milder climate. Still not enough cooling accounted for, even with gasless cattle and people. What else had changed air's carbon?
    ***Sidebar E:
    Some grain sorghum varieties might replace much rice in tropical paddy fields since they cook like rice and yield more per hectare. But there's prejudice for rice over these grain sorghum varieties known as 'poor man's rice'. And grain sorghum might be developed to use Gluconacetobacter to fix nitrogen inside the plants, as was discovered occurring in Brazil in sorghum's close relative, sugarcane.
    A reduction in methane release to air might follow from the switch, in many flooded pond fields, or 'paddies', from growing rice to growing grain sorghum. When grown in flooded soils Sorghum's close relative sugarcane induces a more than ten-fold reduction in 'paddy' soil methane release, by altering the redox state in the pond field's rhizosphere, according to Dr. Snehi Dwivedi. This might reduce 'paddy' methane emission worldwide by 50 billion tons of methane per year, while the grain sorghum's greater yields would increase food carbohydrates from flooded fields as well. We hungry seven plus billion humans might appreciate that, especially considering that many of us eat today thanks to artificial nitrogen fertilizing, which is unsustainably threatening climate-dependent agriculture.
    ---------- End Sidebar***
The short half-life of atmospheric methane and it's enormous impact on global climate within a twenty year period, Tadhg realized, made it particularly likely as a cause of the recent cooling. Tadhg thought slowly as he ate an Indian meal at a nearby restaurant. Then he stopped, looking at the meal. The grain was the newly prominent, yet quite ancient grain sorghum that cooked like rice. Perhaps here was another clue to climatic change. Back at the office, O'Ness scoured Pubmed, then the entire internet for works on altered paddy methane emissions, and found Dwivedi's 1980s article on sorghum's close relative, sugarcane, in paddy fields and it's effects on methane emissions as compared with rice. Luckily the data on the effect on methane emissions of the rice-to-grain-sorghum crop conversion were quicker to get than the satellite data.
    Checking his email, Tadhg came across the satellite data, finally in from the satellite service. O'Ness began a flurry of analysis, plugging satellite data into spreadsheets and programs he'd prepared.  The transfer of data went as planned, so soon Tadhg hd tallied the cumulative greenhouse gas changes from sockeye's iron shuttling, plant darkening, increased aquaculture via OTEC and diked deserts, magnesium-based cement substitution, gasless cattle (and people) and sorghum adoptation in ex-rice paddies. The combined effects could explain the cooling of earth. He sent the results to the journal editor.
    Betty liked what she saw and sent the piece out to peer reviewers. Meanwhile Tadhg called his wife, who reported on their children. Ben's been arrested again for drug possession, while Sally was charged with shop-lifting. O'Ness and his wife set a date to meet with the divorce lawyers.
    For a change of pace, Tadhg glances at the backed-up campus mail. He notices William's letter from the asylum.
    “Dear Professor O'Ness,
    It has come to my attention that you are estimating the climatic effects of the darkening of the plants. You might be curious to know how this occurred......Anyhow, if you do discover an effect, I hope you will document it's source, and the sanity of the effort, given the then-prevalent overheating of earth. This might help free me from the asylum.”
    Tadhg replied, asking William to go on the record with the aphid viroid work.
    Later, Tadhg opened the paper as he eats lunch and finds reports of Phoebe Inoue sued for price-fixing, despite no evidence that she conspired to alter prices in her now-revealed near-monopoly. Overburg had came forward with suspicions of Phoebe cornering the fish feed market, stimulating an investigation that showed the conglomerate Phoebe hid for so long. Now Tadhg had the agent of the sockeye spleen darkening documented too. Also in the newspaper was the tale of the mumps epidemic of some years ago. Joey Fosjocki's work was revealed, and his professional life was over, but for Tadhg, the article just added background depth for his article submission.
    Tadhg's phone rang. It was Samuel from the tenure committee. Tadhg has tenure as soon as he can publish the current article. No sooner did Tadhg hang up, than his wife called, with news that she'll enter marriage councelling if the tenure issue is successfully out of Tadhg's life. His wife went on to say that she'd heard from Ben and Sally. If the family stays together, Tadhg's son Ben says he'll quit drugs and his daughter Sally will commit to putting off suicide.

Date: -----------
From: Samir Osiris, Syndicated Science Publications
To: Prof. Tadhg O'Ness
Subject: Congrats, the last reviewer approved!
Body: Tadhg, your article's been accepted for publication, and will in fact lead a special issue on earth's surprising recent cooling.....


The End.