Hey smart people, Joe here.
Fact: Earth is experiencing climate change on a scale and pace never before seen since
our species has been on the planet, and we’re causing it by pumping more heat-trapping carbon
into the atmosphere than Earth’s natural systems can take out.
Now fixing a problem as massive as climate change is gonna take a ton of different solutions,
but more and more people are asking if trees might be a big part of the answer. For the
past 370 million years or so, they’ve been one of the major ways Earth sucks excess carbon
out of the atmosphere and stores it away. And along with green plants and algae, this
natural technology captures carbon better and cheaper than any human technology we’ve
come up with so far.
But, can trees actually make a big enough difference in cleaning up our mess? Or are
we… well, barking up the wrong tree?
I’m gonna dig into 3 different ways trees might help solve climate change: Planting
a bunch more trees, saving the trees we’ve already got, and whether the field of synthetic
biology might give scientists the power to hack photosynthesis and make trees even better
at being trees.
OPEN
If you were paying attention to YouTube last year then you probably heard about TeamTrees.
A project created by MrBeast, with help from Mark Rober, to raise $20 million dollars to
plant 20 million trees by… well, now. 2020. And they succeeded. Or really, all of us did.
We basically took over YouTube with tree videos, and to date, TeamTrees has raised over twenty-ONE
million dollars to plant 21 million trees, which is insanely awesome.
But the TeamTrees team made one thing very clear: Planting a few million trees isn’t
going to solve climate change on its own.
So, like, what does 21 million trees do for the climate? Tom from the channel Aspect Science
made a great video analyzing how TeamTrees works that you should check out. But… long
story short, 21 million trees covers a lot less area than you think, and according to
researchers. , an area of new forest that size can capture 4 million tons of carbon
dioxide… spread out over tens of years.
Considering that the world is emitting almost 10 *billion* tons of carbon every year, we
would have to do TeamTrees literally thousands of times to plant enough trees to suck it
all up. Sounds pretty impossible, doesn’t it? Well it might not be.
“Meet Felix Finkbeiner”
Today we want to convince the world to plant a trillion trees.
That's roughly the number of trees we have space for globally.
The seed for this idea began when Felix was in just fourth grade, during a presentation
I was giving about climate change back there to tell my classmates that we should plant
1 million trees in each country of the world. My classmates loved the idea they were super
enthusiastic about planting trees over. A few weeks later we planted our first tree
without really knowing where we would go from there. Local journalists reported about this
first tree, that's how some other schools found out about it and that's when a real
competition kicked off - who would plant the most trees and that's how plan for the planet
spread a few years after that. class project Felix his group planted its millionth tree
and he was invited to tell a story before the United Nations. But for us children forests
are our future and there he met someone very special, by far the most important person
in this story was a woman called man Gavin Matai from Kenya.
There are some people who’ve changed the world in incredible ways that almost everyone
knows about. Gutenberg and the printing press. Albert Einstein and relativity. Jonas Salk
and the polio vaccine. But there are others that, for some reason, we never learn about.
Wangari Maathai is one of those people. Maathai was an African biologist who had an idea:
women planting trees across Africa could improve communities, conserve the environment, and
improve human rights at the same time. She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work, but
few people know her name.
One of them most beautiful things she did was she said she used tree planting as not
only a tool for a nature conservation, but also for women's empowerment. When I was nine
years old I heard about this fantastic work, but I didn't I didn't understand the true
depth. I only understood that tree planting helps tackle the climate crisis and saves
the polar bear. She won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work, but few people know her name.
So what impact would planting a trillion trees have? We used to have a roughly six trillion
trees on earth, so this was before humans started cutting them down, and now we have
about half of that remaining. So we've got three trillion instead of six trillion trees
now. Ideally we'd when I come back I go back to the six trillion right, get back every
tree we lost, but of course we need space for our settlements and much more for agriculture.
But we can get about another one trillion back. They wouldn't solve the climate crisis
on their own, of course, we also need to drastically reduce our global co2 footprint, but they
make it possible to ensure that the global temperature does not rise by more than two
degrees. And if we manage to plant these trees they would capture about a quarter of human-made
co2 emissions.
Remember, trees are basically big carbon storage machines that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere
and turn it into more tree. Cutting those trees down and either burning them or letting
them decompose just puts that carbon back in the atmosphere.
Most deforestation happens in Earth’s tropical regions. If this tropical deforestation were
a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of carbon in the world after China and the
US. Almost 1/3rd of all the world’s carbon emissions since 1850 have come from deforestation.
These days, forests remove about a quarter of the CO2 humans emit into the atmosphere
each year and store it away. There is more carbon locked up in the world’s trees than
in all the fossil fuels still remaining in the ground. And beyond carbon, tropical
forests act sort of like the planet’s air conditioning. They pull moisture out of the
ground, release water vapor into the sky, and literally create rain and weather patterns
across the globe. Cutting down these tropical forests can raise nearby temperatures by as
much as 3˚C.
So keeping the trees we have is essential if we want to keep climate change from getting
even worse. To put the challenge into scale, if TeamTrees gave us 21 million trees? The
2019 Amazon wildfires that took over social media? They burned at least a billion trees.
And this year’s Australian bushfires may have burned more than 10 billion trees.
Luckily, protecting the trees we already have is cheaper and easier than planting new ones.
But natural processes like photosynthesis, on land and in the ocean, are only absorbing
about half the CO2 we currently emit every year. I mean, if you think of this like money,
we’re spending more than we earn in our carbon budget. And many experts think saving
trees and planting as many new ones as we can are both part of the answer.
But there is one more idea that could make a big difference, and it relies on something
called “synthetic biology”
When plants like trees take carbon dioxide out of the air, they use a tiny molecular
machine inside their cells called an enzyme to grab CO2, stick that carbon onto another
molecule, and eventually make sugar. This molecular machine’s name is a mouthful–Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate
carboxylase oxygenase–but you can call it RuBisCO for short.
Just about everything on Earth that does photosynthesis–algae, cyanobacteria, grass, trees–you name it,
uses RuBisCO to grab carbon out of the air. Scientists think it’s the most abundant
enzyme on Earth. This little molecular machine has completely reshaped our planet. Problem
is… RuBisCO isn’t very good at its job.
Many molecular enzyme machines can carry out thousands of chemical reactions in a single
second. RuBisCO is super slow. It can only grab 5 to 10 CO2’s every second. And, about
1 out of every 5 times, RuBisCO grabs the wrong molecule–oxygen–instead of CO2,
and wastes energy in the process. If we could make this biological chemistry work better
and faster, maybe we could pull even more carbon out of the atmosphere.
Some scientists have put genes for RuBisCO inside bacteria in an effort to rapidly evolve
a more efficient enzyme. By manipulating the genetic sequence in the DNA code for the enzyme,
researchers can make many more versions of RuBisCO than nature can on its own, and perhaps
one will be faster and more efficient at grabbing carbon out of the sky.
Other researchers are digging through the enormous toolbox of chemical reactions that
exists in nature to look for totally new ways to capture carbon. These researchers start
by designing a highly efficient chemical reaction on paper, then plugging in individual molecular
machines from different species in order to build the chemical process from scratch. These
are pathways that don’t exist in nature (built almost like Legos) by combining different
molecular machines that DO exist.
But even if scientists do figure out a way to improve on biological chemistry, we can’t
instantly go upgrade every photosynthetic organism on Earth, including trees. But it
might give us a new way of capturing carbon using biological reactors at places where
emissions are high, or even lead to devices capable of artificial photosynthesis that
can work alongside the trees and plants we already have.
Unfortunately, it will take decades of research to engineer these molecular machines to be
even close to what nature can already do today using low-tech carbon-sucking, light-eating
machines like trees. Trees are a solution we already have. But as I hope you’ve realized
by now, even if we saved every tree that already exists, and even if we planted trees in every
spot on Earth that could hold them, we still wouldn’t be absorbing all the climate-changing
carbon that we emit each year.
The bottom line is this: No matter what climate change solution we are talking about, whether
it’s trees or electric cars or next-generation nuclear reactors or synthetic meat… none
of it will work unless we stop putting so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
It’s really that simple. Solving climate change isn’t just about what we do, it’s
about what we stop doing too.
Stay curious.