Heliophage

Since one of the infrequent commenters here actually asked, I dug up what I wrote about Prince Charles (One of Time’s Heroes of the Environment) in Newsweek International, June 14th 1999. It’s basically just another example of my tedious banging on on the subject of “nature”, but still current, in that I don’t think my views on this aspect of the subject have changed much in the intervening eight years.

Getting Nostalgic About ‘Nature’

In the debate over genetically modified crops, the question isn’t what’s natural–it’s what’s right. And that’s hard political work.

One of the few diverting aspects of Britain’s largely joyless European election campaign has been the Natural Law Party’s approach to the issues. Other parties say simply that a particular version of Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe would be a rather good or bad thing–whatever. The Natural Law Party [now defunct, alas], on the other hand, promotes the values of Transcendental Meditation and yogic flying, an advanced form of the art which consists of flapping your knees while bouncing around in something like the lotus position. Apparently this has already lessened levels of violence in both Merseyside and the Middle East. The Natural Lawyers do, however, have one concrete political policy. The party wants a Europewide ban on all genetically modified crops.

In this, if in little else, the Natural Law Party is very much in the mainstream. The British public has taken against genetically modified crops in a big way. Activists uproot them and supermarkets attempt not to furnish their customers with them. This week the Prince of Wales–a landowner and organic farmer–came out against them for the umpteenth time, a piece of non-news that still managed to provoke headlines throughout the realm.

Europeans have in general been more skeptical about genetically modified crops than Americans, who have so far swallowed the idea, and the food, with relatively few qualms. And among the Europeans the Brits have been particularly adamant in their refusal to have any truck with such things. The recent history of British agricultural politics–the culling of millions of cows for fear that their increasing madness was spreading into the population at large–has left the public profoundly distrustful of unnatural tinkering in the food chain. The prince says that he wants us to reject all genetic modification and instead work with nature for the long-term benefit of humankind.

The problem with this desire is that nature has no interest at all in the long-term benefit of humankind. Nature has no interest in anything. And even if it did, mankind has been overriding nature routinely for millennia. That’s what agriculture is all about. A natural Britain would be a woodland that could feed only a few–when not covered by the glaciers of a natural ice age. Selective breeding–a subject royalty understands in its bones–removed nature from the farmyard long before the first endonucleases started to cut up the first artificial strands of DNA.

People like the prince use nature not biologically but nostalgically, to refer to a time when things were not so dashed artificial. This is the perennial window dressing of the reactionary, nature as an ideological prop for people whose notion of what is natural tends to include their own position in society. For the prince–doubtless considered by many, if not himself, as Britain’s natural sovereign–nature is part of our very souls, which is why we have an instinctive nervousness about tampering with it. His love for authentic British farming practices is thus part of his sense of what the nature of the British people is, an ideology of blood and the Soil Association.

It is no shock that a man whose own genes have a constitutional importance should worry about genes elsewhere. And some issues that the prince brings up are legitimate causes for concern. The effect of genetically altered organisms on the wider environment needs to be understood better than it is today. The idea that this technology may be controlled by very few companies is disturbing. It fuels widespread fear that genetic modification will serve only as a handmaiden to agribusiness, rather than producing higher-yielding crops to be distributed equitably among farmers in developing countries. But these are all arguments for getting the genetic modification of crops right, technically and politically: not for abandoning it as intrinsically immoral simply because it is unnatural.

The question is not what is natural. It is what is right. Reaching a judgment about that means balancing a lot of different issues and interests: the freedom a company should have to pursue profit within the law; the fear of harm to health or the environment; the altruistic wish to develop technologies that genuinely help developing nations; the self-interest that leads people to want cheaper or better food. Balancing these things is hard political work. But it is possible, and democracies have shown themselves in the long run to be pretty good at it. Democratic efforts to such ends, however, are not helped by a counterproductive nostalgia. Being unhelpful is not against the law, nor should it be. But the fact that Charles gets a platform on such matters purely because of the situation he was born into is still offensive. The bouncy-bottomed Natural Law Party may stand for a lot of tosh, but at least it stands for elections. That puts it one up on the prince.

Prince Charles picture from Smileykt on a creative commons licence; yogic fliers copyright apparently unknown.

Cross-posted from Climate Feedback

There’s an interesting commenary in Nature this week by Steve Rayner of the James Martin Institute in Oxford and Gwyn Prins of the LSE, arguing that while emissions abatement is a global priority, the Kyoto Protocol is the wrong tool for the job — a one-size-fits-all approach that, among other failings, doesn’t actually look likely to deliver the reductions that it has promised. Unfortunately, as they argue, this sub-optimal approach has developed an iconic status of its own, so that in many minds to be against Kyoto is tantamount to being against any form of action on climate. They’re worried that this means people will uncritically attempt to follow up the Kyoto protocol (which expires in 2012) with a son-of-Kyoto that contains many or all of the same flaws, when they should be having a much more radical rethink.

In their words:

The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments’ concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy…Already, in the post-Kyoto discussions, we are witnessing that well-documented human response to failure, especially where political or emotional capital is involved, which is to insist on more of what is not working: in this case more stringent targets and timetables, involving more countries. The next round of negotiations needs to open up new approaches, not to close them down as Kyoto did.

They go on to talk about some of the things they are in favour of: concentrating on the economies that are big emitters rather than treating all nations as equal partners in negotiation, a massive “wartime footing” increase in R&D, “bottom-up” emissions markets, increased spending on adaptation, and a multi-scale “madisonian” approach to the problem like that advocated by David Victor. which I guess encompasses a bunch of their previous points. Their conclusion:

Sometimes the best line of attack is not head-on. Indirect measures can deliver much more: these range from informational instruments, such as labelling of consumer products; market instruments, such as emissions trading; and market stimuli, such as procurement programmes for clean technologies; to a few command-and-control mechanisms, such as technology standards. The benefit of this approach is that it focuses on what governments, firms and households actually do to reduce their emissions, in contrast to the directive target setting that has characterized international discussions since the late 1980s.Because no one can know beforehand the exact consequences of any portfolio of policy measures, with a bottom-up approach, governments would focus on navigation, on maintaining course and momentum towards the goal of fundamental technological change, rather than on compliance with precise targets for emissions reductions. The flexibility of this inelegant approach would allow early mitigation efforts to serve as policy experiments from which lessons could be learned about what works, when and where. Thus cooperation, competition and control could all be brought to bear on the problem.

Illustration by Belle Mellor, borrowed from Nature

Here’s something which follows on from this post about what happens when viruses infect photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans and also from this post about Craig Venter, I guess, in that he is one of the authors of the paper I’m talking about, and the fishing of vast numbers of DNA sequences out of the ocean on which this work depends is something that he has pioneered.

As I was saying in that previous post, viruses which attack photosynthetic bacteria don’t just carry “viral” genes — genes that code for the components of the virus. They code their own versions of “bacterial” genes — genes that the bacteria use in their everyday existence — too. Why bother? Obviously the bacteria already have their own copies of the bacterial genes, and by carrying these genes the viruses are making their genomes bigger and thus more costly to reproduce, which you would think was a bad thing. The answer must be that getting the bacteria to read the viral versions of the genes and thus produce the proteins they encode helps the virus reproduce.

Now a paper by Itai Sharon and a number of co-authors, mostly at the Technion in Israel, published in the new ISME Journal offers further evidence on the matter. They worked with DNA samples from the open ocean, and one of the things they were looking for was those which contained parts of the D1 protein, which is central to photosynthesis. They found a great many copies of versions of the D1 protein from viruses (which could be identified because they were flanked by viral, as opposed to bacterial, genes), and found that they differed systematically from the normally expressed native bacterial versions in two particular parts of the sequence.

The researchers interpret this in the same way that the authors of the Nature paper I blogged about before (people from Penny Chisholm’s lab at MIT, largely) do in a paper they published last year in PLoS Biology. That study showed that in some cases there is a marked preference among the viruses for forms of the D1 protein that look like the forms which some of their hosts keep in reserve for times of stress. It looks quite likely that these viral proteins undergo less turnover than the normal proteins. I imagine they probably pay for this in terms of increased damage and lower efficiency in the long run, but make up for that by requiring less maintenance effort. That’s a good short-term trade-off for a cell with other stresses to deal with — and its a neat trick to steal if you’re a virus that wants to devote as much of your host cell’s capabilities as possible to making more virus. The details of the differences between viral forms of the protein and the common bacterial forms seem to bear this analysis out.

This is not just a quirky thing. Bacterial photosynthesis counts for a significant part of total ocean productivity, and a few percent of those bacteria will, at any given time, be under viral control, and probably expressing viral photosynthesis proteins. The idea that a measurable chunk of the earth’s primary productivity is in the hands of the viruses strikes me as quite a cool one.

A bunch of reviews this weekend for Craig Venter’s “A Life Decoded” (Amazon UK | US). Venter is of direct relevance for this blog because of his interest in using synthetic biology to save the world with better energy sources and carbon sinks. He’s also of relevance because he’s part of one of the great science stories of the past few decades. Here’s an extract from the book in The Guardian (and here’s The Great Beyond’s take on the “synthetic life is just round the corner” news story that went with it).

First review — Clive Cookson in the FT, who pairs the book with Jim Watson’s “Avoid boring people” (Amazon UK | US):

Enjoyment of the comforts of life is one thing that the two authors have in common. Both were born into families that counted themselves as middle class but were financially hard-pressed. Both were motivated initially more by the joy of scientific discovery than financial reward but, as they saw opportunities to accumulate wealth, they did not hesitate to seize them. [...]

Watson, born in 1928, writes – and acts – in a way that seems quaintly old-fashioned compared with Venter, born in 1946. The difference shows up particularly in their attitude to love, sex and marriage. Watson’s pursuit of what he consistently calls “pretty girls” remains largely unsuccessful until the age of 40, when he meets and marries Liz Lewis, a 19-year-old student. Venter, on the other hand, describes sex with a series of girlfriends from the age of 16 onwards, in a manner that would be unthinkable for Watson. (At 16, Watson’s passion was spotting rare birds on the shores of Lake Michigan with his father, a keen amateur ornithologist.) Last year Venter became engaged to Heather Kowalski, his public relations executive, who will be his third wife.

While both men are self-evident egotists, Venter comes across as a more forceful character. There is something almost otherworldly about Watson, as if he does not know what effect he is having on people…Venter, on the other hand, knows exactly what he is doing, whether he is taking a physical risk for sheer exhilaration, such as deliberately sailing a yacht through a storm, or a scientific risk by spending many millions of dollars on unproven DNA sequencing machines … Watson and Venter are the first two people to have had their individual genomes sequenced. Watson has revealed his personal DNA on the Cold Spring Harbor website, in the hope that this will encourage the development of “personalized medicine” – identifying and preventing diseases to which we are genetically prone before they appear. The only exception, withheld for reasons of family privacy, is the ApoE gene, variants of which are associated with Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Venter has gone further, interspersing A Life Decoded with relevant revelations about his own genome. For example, he declares that, of the two copies of ApoE inherited from his parents, one is the harmless ApoE3 but the other is ApoE4 – which can predispose carriers to Alzheimer’s and heart disease. “By reading my own book of life, I have been given a chance to address these potential conditions, because they involve a biochemical imbalance that can be treated.” [...]

Watson won his Nobel prize with Francis Crick 55 years ago. An award to Venter for his pioneering work on DNA sequencing is overdue.

In passing, it’s worth mentioning that while the Craig is an egotist/egomaniac thing can perhaps be overdone, the iconography of the US cover (left) doesn’t help. He’s shown as important enough to block out the sun — and yet at the same time well lit from some other source off to his right.

Jan Witkowski in Nature provides another long, entertaining and thoughtful review. He concludes:

I have interacted with Venter over the years since our first meeting in 1990, and have heard many strong opinions of his character. A Life Decoded is a fair representation of the man. It may even be more revealing than he thinks.

But the differing published accounts of the Drosophila and human-genome sequencing projects are reminiscent of the fable about the blind men who described an elephant by touch. Reading the books by John Sulston and Georgina Ferry (The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome), James Shreeve (The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World), Michael Ashburner (Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced) and now Venter’s contribution, it is scarcely credible that the protagonists lived through the same events. Robert Cook-Deegan’s The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome provided an authoritative, inside-the-Beltway account of the early days of the Human Genome Project, but what we need is a record of the whole project by a team of historians with no axe to grind.

Such an endeavour should begin with a comprehensive collection of material, along the lines of Thomas Kuhn’s Sources for History of Quantum Physics. Kuhn and his colleagues interviewed the participants in, and found primary documents relating to, the greatest change in our view of the physical world since Isaac Newton. The greatest project in biology so far deserves to be similarly documented. The principals are still with us, as are their e-mails.

Chargaff called the heroes of The Double Helix “a new kind of scientist, one that could hardly have been thought of before science became a mass occupation, subject to, and forming part of, all the vulgarities of the communications media”. Four decades on, our infinitely more vulgar media has called Venter many things: maverick, publicity hound, risk-taker, brash, controversial, genius, manic, rebellious, visionary, audacious, arrogant, feisty, determined, provocative. His autobiography shows that they are all justified.

While I’ve not read the Ashburner, I don’t find the accounts to date quite that divergent (though I haven’t cross referenced them thoroughly). And more specifically, I think this call for a balanced overview is a touch unfair to James Shreeve, who wanted his magnificent “The Genome War” (Amazon UK | US) to be such a book. However, though Venter provided him with remarkable access to the events and their records, subject only to a three year non-disclosure agreement, the public effort was much less forthcoming. Francis Collins, while happy to be interviewed, would not give him the same level of access to the public programme. Nor would he provide access to records of the “G-5″ coordinating meetings that the public programme held at the height of the human genome “race”; when Shreeve applied for those records under the Freedom of Information Act he had to work the request for the best part of a year before getting the records, which had almost all the salient details redacted. The reason was that the records were held to contain “commercial and financial information that is privileged and confidential”. As Shreeve notes in his book, “Considering the concerted efforts the Human Genome Project leaders made during the race to distinguish their totally free, totally public version of the genome from Celera’s [ie Venter's] commercial one, the explanation sounds oddly discordant.”

My own take on the book is in the Sunday Times. Ruminative extract:

Genes will never say everything about a life, but they will say a lot. It will cost as much to lay down a full genome analysis for a child born 10 years hence as it will to lay down a case of port. And like the port, the analysis will improve with time, as more is learnt about the meaning of the subtleties encoded in our genes, and about how the pitfalls that appear there can be avoided with foresight.

These birthday genomes will mostly be read for possibilities; only rarely will a genetic destiny be fixed beyond avoidance. But retrospective readings will also be possible. It will be odd if the next 50 years do not bring molecular biographies of figures such as Stalin, Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher (and a revised edition of this book, tricked out with more revealing detail, might be expected a fair bit sooner). Odd, too, if a well-resolved genomic dimension does not add something to all these stories. [But] nobody yet has the language for combining genetic aperçus with more familiar representations of character and narrative. In A Life Decoded we might sense that Venter’s apparent genetic predisposition to attention-deficit disorder explains something about him – but we are hard put to say, within the context of a biography, quite what function such an explanation has. It doesn’t change who he was, or even how he was. Maybe it says something about what he could have been or couldn’t be, but how that might make him or us feel is not yet clear.

There is poetry in seeing Venter’s genome through the story of the life that made genome-reading possible and sensing that his genes, these subjects within the story, were also, in some way, its shapers. But the poetry depends on the reader’s imagination – it is largely absent from the text. I doubt any writer could as yet do justice to such a view of himself, let alone one whose interest is primarily in getting his side of a fascinating set of events down for posterity.

That said, at one point Venter does manage to convey something of the excitement we might experience when the stories of molecules and men are mixed more thoroughly. It comes when he describes his first experiments on the effects of adrenaline on cells grown in the lab: “I gradually moved the [adrenaline-coated] beads to kiss the heart cells, which immediately jumped to a new pace. In elation, and due to the same mechanism, my own heart jumped, too.” The molecular life can be a moving one.

For those not Venter’d out, Carl Zimmer is interviewing him for bloggingheads.tv (not yet seen)

Update: Georgina Ferry has a review of both the Venter and the Watson books in the Guardian. I have to say that it seems to me that her position as a co-author of a book about the same events by one of Venter’s adversaries (”The Common Thread” with John Sulston — Amazon UK | US) should have been made clear to the reader.

Pictures courtesy of publisher’s websites

This week the International editions of Time are doing their annual “celebrating heroes” thing, praising people making a difference, and this year the chosen people are heroes of the environment. (Not available in the US print edition, I’m afraid — but hey, you get a J-Lo interview that we miss out on…) It’s a slightly odd list to my eye, satisfyingly broad-based (it has many people on it about whom most of us will know little or anything, but for whom there’s a good case to be made) but with some people on it that I wouldn’t choose and some omissions that I would have liked to see filled (and since they asked me for advice and I didn’t give as much as I should have, I really shouldn’t complain). It’s particularly weird, the week after the Nobel prize, not to see anyone associated with the IPCC singled out — or for that matter the IPCC itself. It’s also odd not to see much about farming and new farming approaches: we get the Prince of Wales (about whose troubling beliefs I wrote disobligingly for Time’s rivals Newsweek back in 1999, but the piece seems lost to the web Update: now found) and Jose Goldemberg, Brazilian biofuels pioneer, and that seems to be it.

My contribution is a short paean to Jim Lovelock. Excerpt:

Lovelock has been my subject, friend and inspiration for 20 years. Humble, stubborn, charming, visionary, proud and generous, his ideas about Gaia have started a change in the conception of biology that may serve as a vital complement to the revolution that brought us the structures of dna and proteins and the genetic code. That revolution came from the realization that biology required an understanding of living systems at a molecular level; Lovelock’s revolution, as yet unfinished, seeks to understand their mechanisms on a planetary level.

One thing that intrigued me is in the article written by Jim Hansen on Paul Crutzen. Hansen writes:

We would be wise to heed Crutzen on global warming, too, because he can fairly be described as the chief scientific caretaker of life on the planet … In contrast to the prompt attention paid to the ozone threat, foot-dragging on climate change has convinced Crutzen that major geo-engineering may be needed to cool the planet. He suggests a massive injection of sulfur into the stratosphere to form particles that reflect sunlight away. It’s a radical proposal that just might jolt some politicians into realizing what researchers learned long ago: that this scientists’ scientist always seems to be one step ahead of everybody else.

I don’t think Hansen (who’s also one of Time’s heroes, written up by Jeff Sachs) has been so sanguine about geoengineering before. Interesting times (Nature feature | blog post | and another.)

Picture of Jim Lovelock by Sandy Lovelock

A thoughtful (and wonderfully positive) review which, like The Economist’s, goes long on the entropy angle. Surprisingly for the Telegraph, which is meant to be all media to all people these days, it is not on line, at least not yet. (In print, though, it has a very striking sunflower picture, so I’ve prettied up this entry with something similar). Update 18/x/07: the whole review is now online (though without sunflower). Here’s how it begins:

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Victorian physics was the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics and in particular the first law, which states that energy is conserved; it can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form (such as the chemical energy locked up in coal) into another (the heat that powers steam engines). The ‘dark side’ of thermodynamics, as Oliver Morton puts it in his highly original study of photosynthesis, is entropy. The conversion is never completely efficient: whenever energy is converted from one form to another, some of it decays from an organised form (in which it can do work) to a disorganised one (in which it cannot).

Here’s his conclusion:

Photosynthesis is, as Morton eloquently describes it, ‘an everyday miracle, needing nothing but sunlight, air and leaves — and eyes taught to make sense of them’. This book will, quite literally, change the way you see the world as it teaches you to understand the importance of that everyday miracle that we all depend on.

In among the kind words leading to this, Endersby also expresses some doubts about the workings of the book’s first part.

Morton has opted to break the photosynthetic process down into its various components and explain how each of them was discovered, which results in a series of chapters in which the reader is constantly brough up to date with one part of the story and then sent back to an earlier period to follow the parallel but distinct story of another part of the sun-eater’s intricate machinery. Despite Morton’s immense expertise and exemplary clarity, the story is occasionally a confusing one.

However, once the history and basic principles of photosynthesis are out of the way, Eating the Sun really takes off, ranging from the search for life on other planets to the Gaia hypothesis and the historic role of plants in making this planet habitable. Morton is as compelling and eloquent in describing the evolution of landscape as he is at describing the evolution of life itself.

The idea that the book lifts off late is one that I have come across elsewhere (Andrew Brown makes it too, in the most generous way possible) and I can see the sense of the critique. I’ll have to think more about whether I could have managed the narrative more elegantly, and whether my feeling that the first part of the book needs to be as it is in order for the last part to work is really justified.

I don’t know Jim Endersby, but we turn out to have a lot in common, including the HPS department at Cambridge (his connection more eminent than my undergraduate sojourn) and living by the South Downs (he’s a lecturer at the University of Sussex). Like Mapping Mars, his first book has been long listed for the Guardian First Book Award (A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com) and received a recent review by Georgina Ferry. I think I should probably buy him a pint of Harveys.

Image from Joolz Perry under a creative commons licence with thanks

…along with a few thousand other people, and some movie guy. Although I am not uncritical of the IPCC process, I do think it is a grand and important project, and I’m proud of him and the role he played in it as an author on Chapter 5 of Working Group II in the fourth assessment report.

Some things we have in Nature this week prompt me to a catch-up post on biofuels.

If you’re talking about photosynthesis as an energy source, then you’re talking about biofuels, and you have to respect both their promise and their pitfalls. They cannot be a wholesale replacement for fossil fuels. But they are already a large part of the energy economy in many poor countries, where the rural population relies on gathered firewood. Enhancing the efficiency of this biomass use (and replacing it with other renewable sources where possible) would be a worthwhile development goal simply in terms of reducing indoor air pollution. Beyond that, solid and liquid biofuels may have potential in various situations and niches. And by enriching soils, growing biofuels may also draw down some carbon from the atmosphere and tuck it away.

To make this work, though, we need to do two things. One is to find out how best to grow and use the most promising biofuel crops. Another is to stop wasting time and money and goodwill on corn-based ethanol and various low efficiency temeperate-climate-based biodiesel schemes.

We addressed both of these issues in Nature this week. My colleague Daemon Fairless reports from India on jatropha, a much touted oil crop.

Although there is reason to be enthusiastic about jatropha’s potential as a biodiesel feedstock in India and beyond, there is one rather sobering concern: despite the fact that jatropha grows abundantly in the wild, it has never really been domesticated. Its yield is not predictable; the conditions that best suit its growth are not well defined and the potential environmental impacts of large-scale cultivation are not understood at all. “Without understanding the basic agronomics, a premature push to cultivate jatropha could lead to very unproductive agriculture,” says Pushpito Ghosh, who has been working on the plant for the best part of a decade, and who is now director of the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSMCRI) in Bhavnagar.

I think it’s a fine and thought provoking read (and benefits from the fact that our recent redesign has encouraged sometimes robust discussion in the new comments threads).

We also have a leader on biofuels more generally, posted here in its entirety

Kill king corn

Biofuels need new technology, new agronomy and new politics if they are not to do more harm than good.

Zea mays has become the very emblem of plenty, with rich golden cobs of corn (maize) overspilling from some of the most effectively farmed arable lands on the planet. Jatropha curcas, on the other hand, is an unprepossessing and indeed toxic plant, better suited to scrubland and hedges. Yet in the world of biofuels, ugly-duckling jatropha has the potential to be, if not a hero, then at least one of the good guys, and a harbinger of better things to come. The golden-headed siren corn, on the other hand, is inspiring a wrong-headed gold-rush — to a dead-end of development that is polluting the modest aspirations the world might have for biofuels in general.

The common complaints about biofuels — and they seem to become more common by the day — are that they are expensive and ineffective at reducing fossil-fuel consumption, that they intensify farming needlessly, that they dress up discredited farm subsidies in new green clothes, and that they push up the price of food. All these things are true to some extent of corn-based ethanol, America’s biofuel of choice, and many are also true of Europe’s favoured biodiesel plans.

As far as the greenhouse goes, figures from the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Global Subsidies Initiative put the cost of averting carbon dioxide emissions by using corn-based ethanol at more than $500 a tonne of carbon dioxide. What’s more, the heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer in growing corn leads to significant emissions of nitrous oxide, an even more potent greenhouse gas.

Despite this, the generous tax allowance of 51 cents a gallon given to ethanol blenders in the United States has made corn peculiarly profitable (provided that tariffs continue to keep out far more efficiently produced ethanol from the sugar plantations of Brazil). In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis point to estimates that this artificial price-hike will drive world corn prices up by 20% by 2010. This has a knock-on effect on other staple crops — more land for corn means less for wheat, for example. Higher prices are good news for farmers, including some of those in developed countries. But they can be bad news for the very poor, who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on food. According to World Bank studies, for the poorest people in the world a 1% increase in the price of staple food leads to a 0.5% drop in caloric consumption.

This sorry state of affairs has the small benefit of providing a stark, contrasting background against which to sketch out what a successful and sustainable biofuels industry might look like. It will be based not on digestible starch from staple crops such as corn or cassava, but for the most part on indigestible cellulose, with some room for biodiesels that, because they grow on marginal land, do not compete with food production. In the medium to long term, it will not seek to produce ethanol — a poor fuel — but a range of more complex fuels delivered by carefully designed microbes.

A rosy biofuels future will enjoy the benefits of free trade, allowing the countries and peoples of the tropics to ship some of their abundant sunlight north in the form of fuel. It will also require serious amounts of agronomic research — as we report on page 652, one of the most significant problems with jatropha is that, as yet, remarkably little is known about how best to grow and improve it. One focus of such research must be in the development of plants, such as jatropha, that make do on little water, and those that require low inputs of nitrogen. This is inherently more feasible in the case of fuels, where all that needs to be taken out of the system are carbon and hydrogen, than in the case of food, where there is a need to export nitrogen in the form of protein as well. Another focus will be on systems that actively store carbon in the soil, improving it for future agricultural use and at the same time doing a little bit more to take the edge off the carbon/climate crisis.

Biofuels are unlikely ever to be more than bit-players in the great task of weaning civilization from Earth’s coal-mine and oil-well teats. But they may yet have valuable niches — including some that allow them to serve some of the world’s poor, both as fuels for their own use and as exports. Provided, that is, that someone kills king corn.

A few links for those wanting more: Biofuels : Is the cure worse than the disease? (pdf), is a much talked about recent document from the OECD, and the ins and outs of its reception are discussed on the FT’s website. The point about greenhouse emissions from heavily fertilised biofuel crops was made recently by Paul Crutzen and others in this paper (pdf) discussed by Chemistry World and Futurepundit; the conversely optimistic point about biofuel plantations not needing to export nitrogen and thus opening up low intensity options has recently been raised by Robert Anex of Iowa State in work discussed here on the Biopact site. Biomass polycultures leading to increased soil carbon is the subject of a much discussed paper by David Tilman and colleagues in Science last year. This summer the FT ran an op-ed by Jacques Diouf of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation on trade and development issues around biofuels. And then there’s John Mathews’ thought provoking Energy Policy article Biofuels: What a Biopact between North and South could achieve (subscription required), which is I think the first place I’ve seen the term “ergoculture” contrasted with agriculture.

Images from Valerio Pillar, www.jatropha.org and ~dabbler~, formerly jowo under creative commons license with thanks

This one delves a little further into the ideas:

PHOTOSYNTHESIS is the basis of life on Earth. Thermodynamics is the order and disorder in the universe. Put them together and you have the makings of a book that may re-order the way you think about the world. And that is what Oliver Morton, news editor at Nature (and who once worked for this paper), has done.

Mr Morton’s thesis is that modern biology has become so focused on the movement of information, in the form of genes, that it has neglected the processes needed to move that information around: in essence, thermodynamics. People talk glibly of “using up” energy when in fact they are doing no such thing. What is actually used up is order. An energy flow drives the process, but it is disorder (or “entropy”, to use the jargon) that changes, by increasing.

A highly ordered system such as a living thing thus needs an abundant supply of negative entropy (or unentropy, or call it what you will) to maintain its internal order. That negative entropy comes from the sun and is captured by photosynthesis, which uses light to split water molecules and combines the resulting hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form sugars. The sugars are a store of negative entropy that can be used elsewhere. The waste product, conveniently for the animals of Earth, is oxygen.

The book, then, is in part a refrain in praise of photosynthesis, the Earth’s energy and order currency-exchange market. It is also an entertaining history of how the subject arrived where it is today—and an illuminating insight for the non-scientist into how the magisterial pronouncements of science are every bit as much the result of sausage-making as Bismarck’s description of the process of legislation.

Here’s the review in full

Update: No, I don’t know what the words “currency exchange market” are doing in that paragraph either. 

A full review, nicely titled “Living colour”, that sets out a lot of what’s in the book. Excerpts:

[For Oliver Morton] the joy of looking at a tree or a landscape comes from knowing, from the level of individual molecules to the level of planetary evolution, how it came to be the way it is … You might think you know all about photosynthesis from secondary school biology lessons. You know that carbon dioxide plus water plus energy from the sun equals glucose plus oxygen. But from the earliest years of the 20th century, scientists were not satisfied with this cookery-book approach, and neither is Morton. The first section of his book introduces the key figures whose experiments arrived at today’s consensus about how photosynthesis really works … Morton enlivens what can at times be a hard read by vividly describing the passions and rivalries that drove the scientists who tracked these elusive games of pass the parcel…

Astrobiologists tend to agree that whatever forms [complex] life might take, on Earth or elsewhere, it will always need oxygen. The trick, then, is to develop telescopes that can detect oxygen in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. How many of these there might be, in Morton’s view, is “the biggest question that we currently have it in our hands to answer”…

In his final section Morton looks at the planet since the industrial revolution - the lifetime, perhaps, of an average tree. We cannot understand what impact our activity will have on the climate unless we take into account how plants will react to - and possibly exacerbate - alterations in the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles.

Hard-nosed science writer though he is, Morton does not shrink from the word “crisis” to describe what is going on in our atmosphere. Unlike many in the green movement, he is willing to put his faith in technology to solve the problem, but only given a massive investment of resources and political commitment. If just some of the energy that scientists have devoted to understanding photosynthesis goes into low-carbon technologies, we might just be able to do it. If we fail, it won’t be their fault.