Why Do We Need White Bio?
Over the past two centuries, humanity has achieved something extraordinary. We learned how to extract coal, oil, and natural gas from deep underground and turn them into heat, electricity, and mobility. They powered factories and cities, moved cars and aircraft, and provided the carbon for plastics, fibers, solvents, lubricants, pharmaceuticals, and countless other products. Fossil carbon has been one of the foundations of modern civilization. But that success came with a consequence we did not fully appreciate for a long time. We began moving carbon that had been largely isolated in the geosphere into the active surface carbon cycle at an extraordinary rate. And this is where the story of White Bio begins. In this article, I use White Bio in a broad industrial sense: the use of biological resources and processes to produce fuels, chemicals, and materials from renewable biological carbon. 1. We Moved Fossil Carbon Above Ground The Earth has always had a vast carbon cycle. Pla...