The following is an excerpt.
The industrial revolution replaced wood for fossil fuels as the driver of the engine of progress, leaving living plants to take a back seat in energy production. Now, with the advent of a set of technologies known as synthetic biology, industry groups and the US Department of Energy are celebrating the advent of a new “bioeconomy” …
However, early indications show that such an approach likely harbors all of the ill-effects of the fossil fuel economy – simply swapping out black carbon for green – combined with the assault on biodiversity brought on by biotechnologies such as genetic engineering of crops.
View the original article here: Synthetic Biology and the “Bioeconomy”: Feeding Fuel to the Fire of Landgrabs and Biodiversity Loss
