Our Biotech Future
By Freeman Dyson
The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
I predict that the domestication of
biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as
much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the
previous fifty years.
Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and
children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.
Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as
painting or sculpture.
Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy
to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora. The final step in the
domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer
games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds
rather than with images on a screen.
Carl Woese is the world's greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy. He
discovered the large-scale structure of the tree of life. Before Woese, the tree
of life had two main branches called prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the prokaryotes
composed of cells without nuclei and the eukaryotes composed of cells with
nuclei. All kinds of plants and animals, including humans, belonged to the
eukaryote branch. The prokaryote branch contained only microbes. Woese
discovered that there are two fundamentally different kinds of prokaryotes,
which he called bacteria and archea. So he constructed a new tree of life with
three branches, bacteria, archea, and eukaryotes.
Woese presents evidence that Darwinian evolution does not go back to the
beginning of life. Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when
horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist.
Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic
information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by
one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair.
But then, one day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find
itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself
from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species
of bacteria. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper
and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated
itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after
that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes.
The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably
slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery
of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the
pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of
microbial evolution.
Now, after three billion years, the epoch of Darwinian evolution based on
competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when Homo
sapiens began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time,
cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force
of change. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic
inheritance.
In the era of Open Source biology, the magic of genes will be available to
anyone with the skill and imagination to use it. The way will be open for
biotechnology to move into the mainstream of economic development, to help us
solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate the human condition all
over the earth.
A plant is a creature that uses the energy of sunlight to convert water and
carbon dioxide and other simple chemicals into roots and leaves and flowers. To
live, it needs to collect sunlight. But it uses sunlight with low efficiency.
Artificial solar collectors made of silicon can do much better. We can imagine
that in the future we may breed new crop plants that have leaves made of
silicon, converting sunlight into chemical energy with ten times the efficiency
of natural plants.
If the natural evolution of plants had been driven by the need for high
efficiency of utilization of sunlight, then the leaves of all plants would have
been black. Obviously plant evolution was driven by other needs, and in
particular by the need for protection against overheating. That is why it is
reasonable for plants in tropical climates to be green. But this logic does not
explain why plants in cold climates where sunlight is scarce are also green.
After we have explored this route to the end, when we have created new forests
of black-leaved plants that can use sunlight ten times more efficiently than
natural plants, we shall be confronted by a new set of environmental problems.
The twenty-first century will bring us powerful new tools of genetic engineering
with which to manipulate our farms and forests.
Green technology is based on biology, gray technology on physics and chemistry.
Roughly speaking, green technology is the technology that gave birth to village
communities ten thousand years ago, starting from the domestication of plants
and animals. Gray technology is the technology that gave birth to cities and
empires five thousand years later.
Within a few more decades, as the continued exploring of genomes gives us better
knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design
new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way will then be
open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things
that gray technology can do, and also to do many things that gray technology has
failed to do.
Many of the people who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green
technology. But in the end, if the technology is developed carefully and
deployed with sensitivity to human feelings, it is likely to be accepted by most
of the people who will be affected by it, just as the equally unnatural and
unfamiliar green technologies of milking cows and plowing soils and fermenting
grapes were accepted by our ancestors long ago.
My book
The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999) describes a vision of green
technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration from
villages to megacities.
The
Sun, the Genome, and the Internet
by Freeman Dyson
Oxford University Press, 142 pages
From
the complete review's review:
We have always admired
Freeman Dyson highly. A talented scientist
with many interests, he has also managed to convey his interests and thoughts in
his thoughtful and accessible writing.
This small book, based on lectures given at the New York Public Library in 1997
again allow him to share his interesting thoughts with a wider audience.
Dyson's greatest asset as a scientist and thinker is his openness to all
possibilities. He understands that the unexpected is often the most likely of
outcomes, and he is prepared to entertain that and most other possibilities.
Dyson is also a humanist in the broadest sense of the word. For Dyson, one of
the marvels of science is that it can make life so much better for so many, and
one of his goals is to help in that regard.
Dyson is an admirable fellow, and this is an admirable book.
AR Indeed, an admirable
fellow. He was a contemporary of Richard Feynman, and like him a pioneer of
quantum electrodynamics (he proved the equivalence of the three approaches taken
by the Nobelists Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga). For some decades now he has
been at the institute in Princeton where Einstein and Gφdel used to work.
Earlier, he was British, and even learned differential equations at school from
the same textbook by Piaggio that I used (but I had a new copy). Truly an
inspiring figure.
Global Warming
By Freeman Dyson
The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global
Warming Policies
By William Nordhaus
Yale University Press, 234 pages
Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto
Edited by Ernesto Zedillo
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization/Brookings Institution Press, 237
pages
There is a famous graph showing the fraction of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere as it varies month by month and year by year. It gives us our
firmest and most accurate evidence of effects of human activities on our global
environment. The graph is generally known as the Keeling graph. Keeling measured
the carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere from 1958 until 2005.
The measurements have continued since 2005, and show an unbroken record of
rising carbon dioxide abundance extending over fifty years. The graph shows a
steady increase of carbon dioxide with time, beginning at 315 parts per million
in 1958 and reaching 385 parts per million in 2008. And it shows a regular
wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth and decline of carbon dioxide levels.
The maximum happens each year in the Northern Hemisphere spring, the minimum in
the Northern Hemisphere fall.
The only plausible explanation of the annual wiggle and its variation with
latitude is that it is due to the seasonal growth and decay of annual vegetation
in temperate latitudes north and south. The asymmetry of the wiggle between
north and south is caused by the fact that the Northern Hemisphere has most of
the land area. The wiggle measures of the quantity of carbon absorbed from the
atmosphere each summer north and south by growing vegetation, and returned each
winter to the atmosphere by dying and decaying vegetation.
When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the distribution of
vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8 percent of the carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the
atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and
afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact is of fundamental
importance to the long-range future of global warming. Neither of the books
under review mentions it.
William Nordhaus is a professional economist, and his book describes the
global-warming problem as an economist sees it. He is not concerned with the
science of global warming. He compares the effectiveness of various policies for
the allocation of economic resources in response. His conclusions are largely
independent of scientific details. He calculates aggregated expenditures and
costs and gains by running a computer model called DICE, Dynamic Integrated
Model of Climate and the Economy.
Each run of DICE takes as input a particular policy for allocating expenditures
year by year. The allocated resources are spent on subsidizing costly
technologies that reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, or placing a tax on
activities that produce carbon emissions. The climate model part of DICE
calculates the effect of the reduced emissions in reducing damage. The output of
DICE then tells us the resulting gains and losses of the world economy year by
year. Each run begins at the year 2005 and ends either at 2105 or 2205.
The practical unit of economic resources is a trillion inflation-adjusted
dollars. An inflation-adjusted dollar means a sum of money with the same
purchasing power as a real dollar in 2005. The difference in outcome between one
policy and another is typically several trillion dollars.
Nordhaus gives a summary of his results and their consequences. He believes that
the most important concern of any policy that aims to address climate change
should be how to set the most efficient "carbon price," which he defines as "the
market price or penalty that would be paid by those who use fossil fuels and
thereby generate CO2 emissions." He writes: "To a first approximation, raising
the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global
warming."
Nordhaus examines five kinds of global-warming policy. The first kind is
business as usual, in which case, he estimates damages to the environment
amounting to some $23 trillion in current dollars by the year 2100. The second
kind is the "optimal policy," judged by Nordhaus to be the most cost-effective,
with a worldwide tax on carbon emissions adjusted each year to give the maximum
aggregate economic gain as calculated by DICE. The third kind is the Kyoto
Protocol, imposing fixed limits to the emissions of economically developed
countries only.
The fourth kind of policy is labeled "ambitious" proposals, with two versions
which Nordhaus calls "Stern" and "Gore." "Stern" is the policy advocated by the
Stern Review, an economic analysis sponsored by the British government. "Stern"
imposes draconian limits on emissions. "Gore" is a policy advocated by Al Gore,
with emissions reduced drastically but gradually, the reductions reaching 90
percent of current levels before the year 2050. The fifth and last kind is
called "low-cost backstop," a policy based on a hypothetical low-cost technology
for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or for producing energy without
carbon dioxide emission.
Since each policy put through DICE is allowed to run for one or two hundred
years, its economic effectiveness must be measured by an aggregated sum of gains
and losses over the whole duration of the run. The question is then how to
compare present-day gains and losses with gains and losses a hundred years in
the future. If we can save M dollars of damage caused by climate change in the
year 2110 by spending one dollar on reducing emissions in the year 2010, how
large must M be to make the spending worthwhile?
The conventional answer is to say that M must be larger than the expected return
in 2110 if the 2010 dollar were invested in the world economy for a hundred
years at an average rate of compound interest. The question then is how well
different strategies of dealing with global warming succeed in producing
long-term benefits that outweigh their present costs.
Nordhaus displays the results only for a discount rate of 4 percent. This is a
conservative number, based on an average of past experience in good and bad
times, assuming that the next hundred years will bring overall average growth
continuing at the same rate that we have experienced during the 20th century.
When the future costs and benefits are discounted at a rate of 4 percent per
year, the aggregated costs and benefits of a climate policy over the entire
future are finite. The costs and benefits beyond a hundred years make little
difference to the calculated aggregate. Nordhaus therefore takes the aggregate
benefit-minus-cost over the entire future as a measure of the net value of the
policy. He uses this single number, calculated with the DICE model of the world
economy, as a figure of merit to compare one policy with another.
The net values of the various policies as calculated by the DICE model are
calculated as differences from the business-as-usual model, without any emission
controls. A plus value means that the policy is better than business as usual, a
minus value that it is worse. The unit of value is $1 trillion, and the values
are specified to the nearest trillion. The net value of the optimal program, a
global carbon tax increasing gradually with time, is plus three. The Kyoto
Protocol has a value of plus one with US participation, zero without US
participation. The "Stern" policy has a value of minus 15, the "Gore" policy
minus 21, and "low-cost backstop" plus 17.
The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious proposals,
"Stern" and "Gore," are disastrously expensive, the "low-cost backstop" is
enormously advantageous if it can be achieved, and the other policies including
business-as-usual and Kyoto are only moderately worse than the optimal policy.
The practical consequence is that we should:
Avoid the ambitious proposals
Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop
Negotiate an international treaty coming close to the optimal policy
Avoid making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent
Nordhaus does not discuss the details of the "low-cost backstop" that might
provide a climate policy vastly more profitable than his optimum policy. He
avoids this subject because he is an economist and not a scientist. He does not
wish to question the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, a group of hundreds of scientists appointed by the United Nations.
The Keeling graph shows us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere
is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years.
Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the
carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he
mentioned "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" as a low-cost backstop to
global warming. I consider it likely that we shall have such trees within a few
decades.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the
atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it. Or they could convert
it into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is capable of
burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its
grasp. If one quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating
varieties of the same species, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be
reduced by half in about fifty years.
It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic
activities during the second half of the 21st century. Biotechnology could
spread wealth wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. After we
have mastered biotechnology, some low-cost and environmentally benign backstop
to carbon emissions is likely to become a reality.
Global Warming is the record of a conference held at the Yale Center for the
Study of Globalization in 2005. The book consists of an introduction by Ernesto
Zedillo, who was chairman of the conference, and 14 chapters by speakers at the
conference. Among the speakers was William Nordhaus.
The Zedillo book covers a much wider range of topics and opinions than the
Nordhaus book. It includes a chapter by Richard Lindzen, professor of
atmospheric sciences at MIT, who does not deny the existence of global warming,
but considers the predictions of its harmful effects to be grossly exaggerated.
Answering Lindzen in the next chapter is Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics
of the oceans at Potsdam University in Germany. Rahmstorf sums up his opinion of
Lindzen's arguments in one sentence: "All this seems completely out of touch
with the world of climate science as I know it and, to be frank, simply
ludicrous."
In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and
refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right. The great
virtue of Nordhaus's economic analysis is that it remains valid whether the
majority view is right or wrong. Nordhaus's optimum policy takes both
possibilities into account.
The last five chapters of the Zedillo book are by writers from five of the
countries most concerned with the politics of global warming: Russia, Britain,
Canada, India, and China. Each of the five authors has been responsible for
giving technical advice to a government, and each of them gives us a statement
of that government's policy.
Howard Dalton, spokesman for the British government, says: "It is the firm view
of the United Kingdom that climate change constitutes a major threat to the
environment and human society, that urgent action is needed now across the world
to avert that threat, and that the developed world needs to show leadership in
tackling climate change."
All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global
warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main
point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion
which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth,
that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin,
and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.
Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the
ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists
that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation
of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists
holds the moral high ground. This is a religion that we can all share.
Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement believe that global
warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. Much of the public
has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global
warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task
of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are
horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention
from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.
AR Freeman is right, as always. His wisdom is a priceless treasure.
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
By Bret Stephens
The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2008
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria
phenomenon known as global warming.
Much of the science has since been discredited. NASA now confirms that the
hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously
believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate
1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has
been slight cooling in the past five years.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been
expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern
Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the
journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation.
This last item raises a question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence
of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a
nonfalsifiable hypothesis. It isn't science.
The place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief,
and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible
explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed
as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism is equally a rebuke to
capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore
population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic
redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations and global warming
provides a justification.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal
catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. And
surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the
"solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to
personal behavior. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century
equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global
warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed
world needs is a large dose of penance. If you're inclined to believe that our
successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect, global warming
is nature's great come-uppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience
for our worldly success.
William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the
"morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled
religion.
Bret Stephens is a Wall Street Journal columnist on foreign affairs. Earlier, he
was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. In 2004, he was named a Young Global
Leader by the World Economic Forum, where he is also a media fellow.
AR A refreshingly forthright opinion, and the William James invocation hits the spot. But the scientific details are still troubling enough to be worth serious and ongoing debate.
