An island of floating brown Sargassum seaweed
Andrey Nekrasov/Alamy
The big question, in the mid-21st century, wasn’t how to transition away from fossil fuels – that process became self-propelling as renewable energy became ever cheaper – but how to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
In the end, achieving the Great Drawdown, as it became known, required many different approaches, including biological, chemical and technological methods of removal. This dispatch examines two solutions that used the under-appreciated, near-magical power of seaweed: one through robotics and the other through bioengineering. The robot ate vast algal blooms; the genetic engineering approach modified a…
