[mindcrime]

> Is this idea crazy?

I don't think it's crazy at all. In fact, I had a very similar idea a while back. Genetically engineer plants of some sort to grow faster and absorb more co2? Sure, why not.

> What I am missing?

Good question. I'm a complete n00b when it comes to synthetic biologic / genetic engineering / etc. I know just enough to be dangerous, so to speak.

I did have a conversation about this with a friend who is more knowledgeable about syn-bio / genetics than I am (although not really an "expert" as far as I know) and he was somewhat dismissive of the idea, although I'm not sure I fully understood his reason why. He seemed to be appealing to an idea that "trees have been evolving for billions of years, how likely is it that we'd be able to optimize them in any way?" My counter argument was that trees didn't evolve for any specific agenda like "maximize co2 absorption" (other than "survive") and there's no reason to think that we couldn't engineer them to optimize for something like "maximize co2 absorption". I don't remember exactly what his counter to that was, but I think we ended up not really agreeing about the whole thing. That said, he is definitely more knowledgeable than I am in this overall area, so take that for what it's worth.