Engineering Carbon-Hungry Plants

“Human activities currently add about nine gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere yearly. … But no matter how much carbon there is, capturing it and preventing it from reentering the atmosphere is an immense engineering challenge; even today’s best technology is orders of magnitude less effective than photosynthesis at trapping atmospheric carbon. A new analysis published in the October issue of Bioscience suggests that by 2050 humans could offset between five and eight gigatons of the carbon emitted annually by growing plants and trees optimized via genetic engineering both for fuel production and carbon sequestration.”