The New Plants That Could Save Us From Climate Change

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Can anybody think of any unintended consequences in this idea?  Like killing off our food supply?

Plants are incredible organisms. They tend to be very simple, only requiring a little CO2, water, and oxygen in order to live, but they’re capable of tremendous diversity and adaptability. Plants can grow big or small, fat or skinny, entirely based on some simple factors like how much light there is.

Dr. Joanne Chory, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and HHMI, has made a career out of uncovering these factors, developing them into simple rules, and manipulating them to create big changes in plants. Her lab has spent decades studying just how plants can learn and adapt to different kinds of information, and along the way has uncovered a great deal of information about which genes affect plant growth.

Now, she’s using that information to create new plant varieties that could pull incredible amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere and dramatically reduce the effects of climate change. For her work, she’s being honored with the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

Chory’s plan involves a compound called suberin, which most people are familiar with as cork. Suberin has a lot of unique properties that could make it useful for storing carbon from the atmosphere. It’s primarily composed of carbon and it’s not biodegradable, which means it will last a very long time. Suberin can last for “a few thousand years,” according to Chory.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a14000753/the-plants-that-could-save-us-from-climate-change/

[WingNot]

Don't mess with Mother Nature. 

[Doug Loss]

First, getting 5% of the world's farmland (meaning farmers) to plant her suberin-enhanced variants is extremely unlikely unless there were some benefit to be derived from doing so (and I don't mean the whole CO2-reducing "benefit," as that's no benefit at all to farmers).  Absent that, it'll never happen.

Second, suberin isn't biodegradable?  If the amount of suberin available is greatly increased, I can pretty much guarantee that there will be some organism or group or organisms that figure out how to make use of it.  No such a thing as naturally-produced non-biodegradable compounds.