Can Genetically Modified Trees Help Fight Climate Change?
In southern Georgia's pine belt, a group of workers recently planted genetically modified poplar trees that grow wood at swift rates while absorbing carbon dioxide from the air.
Living Carbon, the San Francisco-based biotech company behind the poplars, hopes to transform forestry and use its trees as a large-scale solution to climate change.
Critics of Living Carbon's trees, such as the Global Justice Ecology Project, have called them "growing threats" to forests and expressed alarm that the federal government allowed them to evade regulation.
Living Carbon has invested $36 million in its technology, which has attracted believers and critics alike.
Living Carbon's poplars start their lives in a lab in Hayward, California, where biologists manipulate how the trees conduct photosynthesis to make them grow faster and absorb more carbon.
In 2019, researchers at the University of Illinois genetically modified tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently, inspiring Living Carbon's technology for poplar trees.
Living Carbon has produced engineered poplar clones that grow more than 50% faster than non-modified ones over five months in the greenhouse.
On the land of Vince Stanley, a seventh-generation farmer in Georgia, Living Carbon's workers planted nearly 5,000 modified poplars, which were interspersed with a roughly equal number of unmodified trees.
Stanley hopes Living Carbon's "elite seedlings" will allow him to grow bottomland trees and make money faster, cutting the timber rotation in half.
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