Engineering life: The illusion of a “bioeconomy”

Awareness of the problem of climate change and recognition of its roots in capitalism and inequality has grown, but all too often, big conservationist NGOs and groups focusing on the amount of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere end up having vague and unspecified demands for “action” or “solutions”. For corporations and governments with a strong interest in maintaining business as usual, those vague demands are an open invitation: new opportunities for profitmaking and political gamesmanship.

Especially eager to maintain business-as-usual, and profit wherever possible, big agriculture and forestry, fossil fuel interests, the aviation industry, the US military and big biotechnology industries seek to develop and provide alternative forms of energy and chemicals – a “green bioeconomy” based on plant biomass rather than the current “brown economy” based on fossil fuels. They offer an easy way out and the promise to avoid any threat to the status quo. They promise to perpetuate the same system, the same economy, and even more profitmaking – dressed up in a different color.

Inconveniently, delivering a “bioeconomy” on the scale of the fossil fuel economy would require many planets worth of biomass (organic matter to be used as feedstock). Industry insists they can deliver “energy independence” with “low carbon” and “sustainable” bioproducts. They refer in glowing terms to plentiful and abundant “wastes and residues” and use of “marginal lands” (a term that often refers to lands that are not under production in service of the global economy, even though they may be central to the livelihoods of local people, small farmers or used seasonally by pastoralists). Yet, even at the current scale of production in order to fulfill mandates for transportation biofuels, especially from the US and the EU, impacts can be seen in rising food costs, loss of soil, water and biodiversity, land grabs and speculative investments.

In addition to the unimaginably vast amounts of biomass required, industry insists that achieving a “bioeconomy” depends on some unimaginable feats of genetic engineering, which is where biotechnology enters the picture. Researchers are busily working to deliver the goods: engineering, synthesizing and redirecting the genetic heritages of various crops, trees, microbes, algae, and other life forms, turning them from their evolved place in the web of life into living chemical factories that spew out the raw materials of the “green economy”: biofuels, biochemicals, bioplastics and biopharmaceuticals, bioproducts and much more. Thus, the hopeful and heavily subsidized embrace of a “bioeconomy” is sold as a “solution” to climate change that might seamlessly replace the fossil fuel economy.

For example, The US Department of Energy now hosts a project referred to as “PETRO”, an acronym for “Plants Engineered to Replace Oil”. Along with other government agencies, they seek to fast track field tests on a suite of genetically engineered crops and trees across the Southeastern US. Genetically engineered trees are a severe threat for expanding deforestation, depletion of soil nutrients and water and dispossession of local communities, especially in the Global South. In addition, the Defense Advanced Research Program Administration (DARPA) has opened a new Biological Technologies Office, with a “Living Foundries” program. They aim to use new synthetic biology technologies to quickly develop new fuels, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and materials for defense purposes. They also recognize potential applications for biowarfare.

Biotechnologists now have a whole range of extremely risky and essentially unregulated new synthetic biology tools to wield, with names like “CRISPR”, “RNA interference” and “zinc fingers”. These permit drastic manipulations and rearrangements of the evolved genetic heritage of living organisms, far above and beyond anything previously possible or even imagined, and at a much faster pace.

Among the new horizons researchers are working to develop “genome editing” and “gene drives” aimed to deliberately force new genes to spread in nature. They have developed techniques for “directed evolution”, and are working to “enhance photosynthesis”. Others are developing synthetic microbes to extract coal bed methane or secrete drilling lubricants for the fracking industry. Biotechnologists have engineered E. coli bacteria to pump out propane,[1] yeast to pump out morphine,[2] microalgae that squirt ethanol, chemicals for plastic manufacturing, or any of a variety of other industrial chemicals.

Aquabounty seeks commercial release of GMO salmon, and scientists amuse themselves by engineering featherless chickens,[3] goats that produce pharmaceutical milk and chickens with dinosaur faces.[4] Others seek the techno-resurrection[5] of extinct species or are banking on profits from patented climate change resistant seed varieties. In garages and back rooms, DIYers (do-it-yourself) insert mail ordered gene sequences[6] into microbes, offer glowing plants[7] in exchange for kickstarter donations and struggle to poke “milk”[8] out of yeast. Tree biotechnologists engineer designer trees[9] to fulfill the vast dreams of pulp and paper and biomass industries. Synthetic microalgae secrete ingredients for face creams and vanilla flavoring is squeezed from yeast[10] while vanilla farmers are squeezed out of business. Scientists have even succeeded to use new “gene editing” techniques on human embryos[11] raising the potential for designer babies.

New techniques, new organisms, new horizons and new frontiers for profitmaking. For some, the prospects seem exhilarating. For many, they are terrifying. The scale and scope for biotechnology has blasted wide open and in the process, transgressed some sensitive boundaries.

So here we stand in the midst of a maelstrom of new techniques, new organisms, new concerns, and potential risks while there is ever greater pressure, funding and incentive to engineer and deliver the new “bioeconomy”.

These tools are so powerful they enable us to create, recreate, resurrect and redesign life forms that evolved on earth over millions of years. Or do they? Perhaps what they really enable us to do is mess things up royally. The language of life is something sacred and wondrous, full of mystery and surprise. It is not something to be taken off into a laboratory to be distorted, manipulated and recoded into service of the human industrial economy and corporate profitmaking. With modest humility we have to recognize that we simply cannot control genes, their expression, or their evolution over time. Nature is complex, messy and unpredictable and furthermore has a right to its own ways, its own place in creation and its own future evolutionary path.

Underlying the “bioeconomy” push is the myth that plant biomass is “carbon neutral”. The story goes that new plants or trees will grow and reabsorb an amount of carbon equivalent to what is released when they are cut and converted to fuels. This myth has been effectively perpetuated among industry and policymakers in spite of the fact that researchers and social movements have repeatedly demonstrated otherwise. For example, cutting trees to burn for electricity releases more CO2 than even coal (per unit of energy), and that does not even consider the loss of forest carbon sequestration, the land use change or the emissions from harvest and transportation. Similarly, when fully assessed, transportation biofuels such as corn ethanol or palm oil biodiesel contribute to climate change rather than reducing emissions. Nonetheless, all are still generally assumed to be effective in reducing emissions or more generally considered “carbon neutral”. Not surprisingly, the energy industry is the big winner in the run up to build such a “bioeconomy”.

Building on that misconception are calls at international fora, such as the UN climate conferences, for “net zero” emissions and climate geoengineering. Bioenergy with “carbon capture and sequestration” (aka BECCS) is presented as a means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The logic is based on the assumption that all bioenergy is carbon neutral, and when the emissions are captured and buried somewhere under ground they would become “carbon negative”. Climate geoengineers argue that on a very large scale this technology could “fix” the pollution in the atmosphere. The IPCC even incorporated BECCS into the scenarios they considered in the recent assessment report (on mitigation).[12] They argued that BECCS or other “carbon negative” technologies make it acceptable for emission pathway trajectories to “overshoot” because we can later “clean up” the excess CO2 . These technofixes completely disregard the fact that bioenergy is never “carbon neutral” in the first place and can therefore never become “negative”. Deploying bioenergy on a very large scale based on such false misconceptions would be utterly disastrous.

The entire concept of manipulating and engineering trees, microbes and other life forms to meet an insatiable demand for fuels, chemicals and materials, is ethically and morally bankrupt. The arrogant and reductionist mentality that approaches nature as something to engineer for commercial purposes entirely ignores any understanding of the profound, intricate and beautiful interconnectedness of all life forms, achieved as a product of our shared evolutionary heritage.

*Rachel Smolker has a PhD in biology and worked for many years as a field zoologist prior to switching to climate activism. She is co-director or Biofuelwatch. and a board member for Global Forest Coalition.

END NOTES

[1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/researchers-produce-propane-using-e-coli-bacteria/
[2] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/brewers-yeast-morphine-sugar/
[3] http://www.reuters.com/news/picture/genetically-modified-animals?articleId=USRTXTZ7A
[4] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150512-bird-grows-face-of-dinosaurhttp://www.bbc.com/earth/story/201
[5] http://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_the_dawn_of_de_extinction_are_you_ready
[6] http://parts.igem.org/Help:An_Introduction_to_BioBricks
[7] http://www.etcgroup.org/kickstopper
[8] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/diy-biotech-vegan-cheese/
[9] http://stopgetrees.org/
[10] http://www.foe.org/projects/food-and-technology/synthetic-biology/No-Synbio-Vanilla
[11] http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-scientists-genetically-modify-human-embryos-1.17378
[12] IPCC, Climate Change 2014, Mitigation of Climate Change

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