Synthetic Biology for Carbon and Climate
Biology is a climate technology. Or maybe biology is a thousand different climate technologies. Many of the biological applications that can help us meet our climate goals are powered by synthetic biology - the underlying toolset for reading and writing DNA. So today we're looking at DNA for some unifying perspective on the many things biology can do for climate.
More about synbio for carbon and climate
The Role of Synthetic Biology in Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Reduction: Prospects and Challenges (Charles DeLisi and coauthors)
The Untapped Climate Opportunity in Alternative Proteins (BSG)
Sustainable feedstocks: Accelerating recarbonization in chemicals (McKinsey & Co.)
Looking for a climate job? Consider biotech (Lily Fitzgerald)
The Synthetic Biology Climate Change Opportunity (Tom Baruch)
A Bioengineering Roadmap for Negative Emissions Technologies: Master’s Thesis (Sarah Sclarsic)
Engineering Biology for Climate & Sustainability (EBRC Research Roadmap)
Transcript
Let me set the stage. You work in policy. You work in climate. You're staring down these very ambitious targets from the Paris agreement. The stakes are high. The complexity is enormous. But you get to work.
You're looking for the emerging technologies that we need to accelerate and scale if we're going to reduce carbon emissions by 43% by 20301. And as you do, biology keeps coming up.
The living world is what we're fighting for. The negative impacts of climate change are biological in nature: biodiversity, food security, human health. Biology is also, potentially, our greatest ally. Because biology loves carbon. Biology is carbon. It drives the carbon cycle: capturing, storing, releasing carbon at the gigaton scale. Bio has a role in addressing the climate crisis - that’s clear.
But things get less clear when we start to explore specific uses of biotechnology. There are so many different ways that biology interacts with climate and with human economic activity that the possibilities are overwhelming. Biology can do too much.
It’s kind of like how they used to teach intro level bio classes. If you’re a certain age, you were probably taught about the living world as a huge collection of loosely related facts. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Dinosaurs were reptiles. There are 400,000 species of beetles.
In policy terms, this suggests the perspective that every biotechnology is a special flower, with unique challenges, opportunities, markets, risks, regulations, etc. You need to be a narrow specialist to get the details right.
And there's some truth to this. Diversity is a fact of biology. But life on earth also has this beautiful underlying unity thanks to DNA. The mitochondria, the dinosaurs and the 400,000 beetles all have genomes written in DNA. Similarly, DNA is a common thread across almost all biotechnologies.
The tools that we use for reading, writing and editing DNA are collectively called synthetic biology. The better we get at DNA, the more we can push forward a diverse set of biotechnologies to match the diverse set of climate problems.
This figure is adapted from Our World in Data, it shows the major sources of carbon emissions in the world as of 20162. This slice of the pie is energy, it includes some familiar sources of CO₂ like when we burn fossil fuels to power cars or to generate electricity.
Over here are the sectors sometimes called "hard-to-abate," because carbon is more integral to what they make and do. They're not just burning it as a power source, so renewable forms of energy like wind and solar won't help much to reach our targets here.
Biology can play all over this pie, including in some of the hardest sectors. Let's take a look at some examples.
Here's petrochemicals. Today about 20% of every barrel of crude oil goes to make non-fuel products3: polymers, plastics, dyes, resins, fragrances, pharmaceuticals. Industrial chemistry has an incredible talent for taking chains of carbon and reshaping them into useful molecules.
But it turns out, biology is good at this too. Microbes use enzymes to cut, paste, decorate and reshape carbon chains into all the molecules of life. In some cases, biology can produce exactly the industrial chemicals we already use. In other cases, biology might make something similar of comparable performance.
And microbes can do it with low-cost, sustainable feedstocks. Things like organic waste, or by-products from other industrial processes. As a result, microbial fermentation can make a lot of this stuff with 50-90% lower emissions4.
Over in the food system, the biggest source of greenhouse gasses comes from the production of animal protein. According to a recent report from Boston Consulting Group, if we can win an 11% market share for alternative protein, that would be roughly equivalent to decarbonizing 95% of aviation5.
Microbes can produce alternative proteins directly, through large-scale fermentation, or they can produce flavors and functional ingredients that make plant-based proteins more delicious. We know that biology can produce the protein that we eat, because it already does.
Speaking of food, the fertilizer that helps to grow our food is a major source of carbon emission across the energy, agriculture and chemical sectors. Nitrogen-based fertilizers are responsible for about 2% of total global emissions.
But microbes that live in the soil can also produce fertilizer. In fact, they're already doing it. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria like azotobacter transform atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, nitrate, and other forms that plants can use. We can enhance this natural ability to replace chemical fertilizers with bio-based alternatives that live right there in the soil. Growing food more efficiently also reduces land use and deforestation, two more significant drivers of emissions.
I'm going to stop there. I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to make this video an endless list of climate projects for biology. And I think that's enough examples to give a sense for the big picture.
Chemicals, foods, fertilizer. Each of these products are completely different. They play in different industries. They have different challenges to be scaled up efficiently, safely and cheaply. But under the hood, they're all running on DNA.
DNA is the programming language and each sustainable bioproduct is an application. Synthetic biology is our set of tools for reading and writing DNA. It's the underlying technology that allows us to discover the right set of genetic instructions for a particular use, transfer them to a living cell, and put them to work.
How about engineering soil to better sequester carbon?
How about sustainable aviation fuels produced through fermentation?
How about reducing crop respiration to collect more carbon from photosynthesis?
How about faster-growing trees?
How about enhanced rock weathering, accelerated by enzymes?
There is an entire industry here - a whole new bioeconomy of bioproducts. A report from McKinsey Global estimated that 60% of the physical inputs to the global economy could eventually have biological sources6, a mostly biological economic world.
It's a vision of practical self-preservation in the face of the climate crisis. But it is also a hope for a green and thriving future. What is more beautiful than biology? What can spark more joy? There is a natural alignment between what biology can make and what people want - with all the new economic opportunities that implies.
Everywhere I go, I meet entrepreneurs with incredible motivation to take on the hardest problems in carbon and climate. Not all of these ideas are going to work. But advances in DNA technology are making it faster and cheaper to try. DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis. Gene editors like CRISPR. Laboratory automation. Generative AI.
At this moment in history when the world needs more biology, the DNA tools have come together to make it possible. Policymakers, by supporting synthetic biology as an enabling technology, can advance 1000 different sustainable business models and products, all at once.
If you'd like to learn more and help us build the green bioeconomy, check out the links below this video.
The Paris Agreement, United Nations Climate Change
Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector, Our World in Data
2022 Sustainability Report: The Impact of Cell Programming, Ginkgo Bioworks
2022 Sustainability Report: The Impact of Cell Programming, Ginkgo Bioworks
Alternative Proteins, Boston Consulting Group
I also recommend Homeworld Collective (https://www.homeworld.bio) for those looking to find a community centered around climate biotechnology.