Time for a Utopian Moment

The iPhone definitely looks cool. This, if it works, would be even cooler: "His goal is to make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane, used as a feedstock for other fuels. Such an achievement might reduce dependency on fossil fuels and strike a blow at global warming."

I was going to turn this into a post about techno-utopians who think there's no need for serious action against global warming because they just assume these magical genetically engineered bacteria will solve all our problems. Reflecting, though, the point is that there's sigificant synergy between utopian dreams and standard-issue regulatory impulses. Any rigorous effort to curb global warming, especially a cap-and-trade system, would dramatically increase the monetary value of the sort of thing this guy is trying to create and make it much more likely that novel technologies along these lines secure invest dollars and get brought to market.

Comments

These folks will probably be there first with better productivity on the fixing CO2 front, but I do agree that the Venter work is cool.

Algae on the Edge

Posted by justawriter | June 29, 2007 3:12 PM

Methane is even more potent than CO2, by about 20 times. So what is the big deal?

Posted by Tom | June 29, 2007 3:14 PM

For years, I have had this feeling that Craig Venter was really nothing more than a snake oil salesman. The article seems to be nothing more than a "proof of concept" and it may be years (if it can be done at all) before a system can be developed to produce massive (industrial) quantities of methane.

Posted by zAmboni | June 29, 2007 3:22 PM

Although my post above sounds dismissive, I didnt mean for it to be that harsh. It sounds pretty cool, but I really don't like the hype things up by press release route.

Tom: Its not as if Venter is looking to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and then re-release it as methane. The methane itself can be used as a fuel, but also could be used as the building block for other fuel synthesis.

Posted by zAmboni | June 29, 2007 3:26 PM

That's a terrific point that I haven't heard made enough: CO2 caps are what will end up providing the incentive for the eventual technological solution. The Left should do a better job of reminding people that the individual/economic sacrifices they are proposing will most likely be quite temporary.

Of course, there will always be people on the left who believe that the modern American high-energy suburban lifestyle is the problem in and of itself, regardless of climate change, and I guess those people aren't really interested in technological innovations that might make such a lifestyle sustainable for another millenium.

Posted by Michael | June 29, 2007 3:46 PM

If what Matthew says is true, then Europe and the rest of the Kyoto world will solve global warming without us having to do anything. Why not just free ride on their efforts? I mean, they have no problem free riding on our defense expenditures, high pharmaceutical prices, etc.

Posted by Al | June 29, 2007 3:58 PM

Europe free-rides on neither our defense expenditures nor our high pharmaceutical prices.

Anyway, getting back on topic: this just goes to show you that "Econ 101" is really pro-liberal. You learn about externalities in Econ 101.

Posted by JP | June 29, 2007 4:08 PM

You know, there's nothing "magical" about an organism that uses photosynthesis to turn CO2 into fuel. Every plant does that.

Posted by Josh Yelon | June 29, 2007 4:08 PM

I have had this feeling that Craig Venter was really nothing more than a snake oil salesman.

Craig Venter is more than a snake oil salesman. But snake oil is definitely one of the products he's selling.

Biotech, for whatever reason, seems to be a field filled with cranks and hucksters who make exactly one useful contribution to the field before lapsing into quackery. Take Kary Mullis, for example.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 29, 2007 4:09 PM

"Methane is even more potent than CO2, by about 20 times. So what is the big deal?"

Tom

Yeah the article isn't really clear on how it could be used...Is the methane captured? I was going to say that methane can be used as a fuel, but then when used, it's byproduct is CO2 as with all combustions, for whatever fuel it might be 'feedstock' for. It doesn't seem to help global warming at all, unless the methane is somehow used in a non-fuel manner. And yeah, if it isn't captured, the 20 times worse really kicks in...

Posted by WishyWashySeattlite | June 29, 2007 4:12 PM

Here's my Utopian plan:

(1) Wire up parking meters with smart power outlets that auto-bill you like E-Z Pass, starting in urban areas.

(2) Massive switch to electric cars, that can be easily recharged.

(3) Hook up Magic Plasma Machines to all carbon-based power plants to strip out all CO2 (and other waste products).

(4) Impeach Cheney.

Posted by Simon Ramone | June 29, 2007 4:14 PM

This isn't really a carbon sequestration technology -- as mentioned, methane is a worse greenhouse gas. It's a (presumably) solar technology, which just happens to use one greenhouse gas as a feedstock and another as an energy transport. There's no free ride, energetically speaking, from stable CO2 to relatively energy-dense methane. But photosynthesis is much more efficient than our solar technologies, for reasons that scientists are still working out. This isn't actually all that different from cellulosic ethanol, except that ethanol production uses two different organisms, and transfers its energy in a less energetic molecule. Presumably getting the operation down to a single organism would make the process more efficient, though, and maybe cheaper after Venter's patents expire.

Posted by Tom | June 29, 2007 4:39 PM

So, I'm the only person who read the first two sentences and thought, "why would we want our cell phones producing methane?"

Posted by Sam L. | June 29, 2007 5:59 PM

I, too, don't get the benefit. How is does this compare as a source of fuel to, say, switchgrass ethanol (as opposed to the corn ethnol comparison they made)?

If you burn (oxidize) methane, what's the CO2 output? Too many numbers that need to add up in beneficial ways are missing from this story.

That said, it does seem clear that appropriately targeted governmental incentives/regulation would spur innovative solutions even if this isn't one of them ultimately. And so-called "synthetic biology" is going to do all kinds of things in the future that we can't really even imagine now.

Posted by Daddy Love | June 29, 2007 6:21 PM

So, I'm the only person who read the first two sentences and thought, "why would we want our cell phones producing methane?"

With a sufficiently hip marketing campaign, Apple's new assPhone will undoubtedly be wildly popular.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 29, 2007 7:59 PM

there will always be people on the left who believe that the modern American high-energy suburban lifestyle is the problem in and of itself, regardless of climate change

I'm sure there will always be people on the right who see absolutely no problems at all with the atomized, anti-community suburban lifestyle in and of itself, regardless of climate change.

Posted by jonnybutter | June 29, 2007 9:21 PM

"The iPhone definitely looks cool."

I'll settle for the Mac Pro I use at work, especially if my employer sells it to me for less than half of the 2.5k it actually cost. I'd also settle for a brain with 500gb of storage space.

Posted by Linus | June 29, 2007 9:58 PM

If this were to work, it would certainly strike a blow against fossil fuels. However, it will certainly not strike a blow against global warming.

Even if it were converted to more highly-chained carbons (which would be frickin' cool), it would still not help with global warming... unless of course, the answer would be to pump the newly produced 'bacterial fuel' back into the ground...

Posted by Klug | June 29, 2007 10:17 PM

Posted by jonnybutter | June 29, 2007 9:21 PM:"I'm sure there will always be people on the right who see absolutely no problems at all with the atomized, anti-community suburban lifestyle in and of itself, regardless of climate change."

Damn right.

Especially as suburb life is not that atomized or all that anti-community in real life. Sure, it can be if you want to live that way. It is easy to be alone if you want to be. But the suburbs of the US are covered in thick dense networks of social obligations, responsibilities and duties. Americans volunteer in surprisingly large numbers. They sit on School boards and work for the PTA. They go to Church. They do social work. America has given the world organizations like Rotary, Chambers of Commerce, even, God help us, the Elks.

And unlike, say, India where "community" is a prison you cannot escape, this is all freely chosen and freely undertaken. If you don't like it you don't have to do it.

Posted by HeiGou | June 30, 2007 8:55 AM

"Biotech, for whatever reason, seems to be a field filled with cranks and hucksters who make exactly one useful contribution to the field before lapsing into quackery. Take Kary Mullis, for example."

It's up for debate that Mullis made even a single significant contribution to biotech. PCR was well on its way to being developed without any involvement from him; and his efforts at legitimizing the 'HIV does not cause AIDS' position have probably done much more harm than his work on PCR has done good. That he could be so obviously ignorant of the bulk of the AIDS literature while at the same time presuming to lecture experts in the field really makes it hard to swallow his assertions about OTHER scientists being closeminded and unwilling to follow the evidence where it leads.

Posted by Bison | June 30, 2007 11:08 AM

...suburb life is not that atomized or all that anti-community in real life. Sure, it can be if you want to live that way. It is easy to be alone if you want to be. But the suburbs of the US are covered in thick dense networks of social obligations, responsibilities and duties....
And unlike, say, India where "community" is a prison you cannot escape, this is all freely chosen and freely undertaken. If you don't like it you don't have to do it.
Posted by HeiGou | June 30, 2007 8:55 AM

You'd think that science types (I'm guessing, anyway) would argue better than that. So, the alternative to American suburban life is Calcutta? RIGHT!

I have lived for many years in both suburbs and several large American cities, including NYC, Chicago, and Philly. There is a distinct difference in the politics and socialization in the two kinds of areas. Of course there are social networks in the suburbs and of course you can be alienated in the city. And just as surely there are important social networks which aren't physical at all (ie, via the series of toobz). But everything in the burbs starts and ends with the illusion of extreme individuality - your own car, your own house, your own dirt, and your own packet of individually wrapped cheese slices. I live in a big city right now, and you can tell right off who the suburban visitors are: people who find it strange to walk on a street and are quite uncomfortable - or dumbfounded at - being around strangers there ('look, it's a person who isn't white! Are they going to attack me?); tend to be rude, selfish and undersocialized; can't wait to get home to their car; etc. American cities are America's own third world, in a way.

I have no emperical evidence here, but I think this widespread illusion of being really discrete tends to go hand in hand with really bad, unrealistic national and regional politics - local too, sometimes. In a word, anti-politics. This isn't the 'rugged' kind of individualism - this is obiviousness in the heart of a complex mass culture. It's atomization.

I don't blame suburbanization (or exurbanization) for all our bad politics and culture. As I say, I've lived quite a bit in suburbs, and there are a lot of things to like about that kind of life (sorry, 'lifestyle'). But the world looks a lot different alone (most of the time) in your personal vehicle, apprehending life through a windshield, as compared to having to actually deal physically with people you don't know or understand now and then. The former is an illusion of self-sufficiency, and abstraction. Living in the burbs makes you live in your head, because you spend so much time in your car.

Again, I don't blame the suburbs for everything. What I suggested was that there are inherent problems with living like that, that it's not an unmitigated good, regardless of the climate change/energy issue. I think it's indisputable. For the most part, it wasn't cities which enabled voodoo economics and all the other crappy, patently unworkable conservative revolution policies. The burbs can be nice, but they are a bit of a fantasy world.

Posted by jonnybutter | June 30, 2007 9:47 PM

"Yeah the article isn't really clear on how it could be used...Is the methane captured?"

Methane is a very useful fuel that is very inconvenient to transport. If you could generate it right where you use it, that would be extremely useful.

It would also be neat to package the organism with the new methane fuel cells:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v400/n6745/abs/400649a0.html

The tech does no carbon sequestration, but it is a carbon neutral source of energy.

Posted by Njorl | July 2, 2007 11:17 AM