How supercharged plants could slow climate change | Joanne Chory

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Plants are amazing machines -- for millions of years, they've taken carbon dioxide out of the air and stored it underground, keeping a crucial check on the global climate. Plant geneticist Joanne Chory is working to amplify this special ability: with her colleagues at the Salk Institute Plant Biology Laboratory, she's creating plants that can store more carbon, deeper underground, for hundreds of years. Learn more about how these supercharged plants could help slow climate change. (This ambitious plan is a part of The Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features plant geneticist Joanne Corey, recorded live at TED 2019.
0:08.0	This ambitious idea is part of the Audacious Project.
0:11.9	Ted's initiative to inspire and fund global change.
0:16.2	Learn more at audaciousproject.org.
0:21.1	I recently had an epiphany.
0:23.7	I realized that I could actually play a role
0:27.0	in solving one of the biggest problems
0:29.9	that faces us,
0:31.3	and faces mankind today,
0:33.3	and that is the problem of climate change.
0:36.8	It also dawned on me that I had been working for 30 years or more
0:40.6	just to get to this point in my life
0:43.2	where I could actually make this contribution to a bigger problem.
0:47.6	And every experiment that I have done in my lab over the last 30 years,
0:51.9	and people who worked for me did in my lab over the last 30 years, has been
0:56.5	directed toward doing the really big experiment, this one last big experiment. So who am I?
1:03.7	I'm a plant geneticist. I live in a world where there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere because of human activity. But I've come to appreciate
1:15.1	the plants as amazing machines that they are whose job has been really to just suck up CO2 and
1:23.4	they do it so well because they've been doing it for over 500 million years,
1:28.7	and they're really good at it.
1:31.2	And so we said,
1:33.5	so I also have some urgency I want to tell you about, as a mother,
	...

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