Plastic munching microbes are the poster child for technology not being the solution to the climate crisis

The US's National Renewable Energy Laboratory is reporting some success in taking a genetically engineered microbe and tweaking its characteristics such that it can break down plastic in the environment - creating the building blocks for new plastic in the process. The difference here is that the NREL believe they have a solution for a wide range of plastics and something which could potentially allow all plastic types to be recycled, not just the handful for which this is currently possible.

In theory this might be a positive step, but like the movie-goer who can see the awful mistake being made by the scientists ten minutes into the two hour horror movie, there's cause for us to be alarmed.

Plastic eating microbes which can consume plastics in a matter of minutes sound like a great idea in a recycling plant, not such a great one in your plane at 30,000 feet or in your hospital equipment at 3am in the emergency department. 

Right now the NREL's process requires some chemical breakdown of the plastics before feeding them to the microbes, but the target is almost certainly to eliminate that step and allow the microbes to do the job all on their own. It isn't even that it's easy to contain microbes outside of laboratory conditions, so when these escape the recycling plants where they get used they will inevitably be transferred through our built environments, feeding on plastics and multiplying at a greater and greater rate.

The doomsday scenario would see all the plastic around you dissolve into a gooey mess before your eyes. That's a scary prospect.

All to allow the continued production of plastic products from oil which should be left in the ground. It isn't even as if solving the plastic problem is hard - stop producing plastic, properly handle the plastic we have and clean up as much of the remaining mess as we can. We have bequeathed our descendants a world full of microplastics, the best we can achieve now is to stop adding to the problem.

Like shading the earth, seeding the clouds and other ridiculous schemes to solve the climate crisis; plastic eating microbes are at best a dead end research, as worst a planet damaging catastrophe in the making. They aren't products of investment to solve the climate crisis, they are investments in ways to allow things to carry on as normal. To persuade us that we can keep buying things, driving our cars, living in a linear high consumption, throwaway society, because technology will solve the problems these activities create.

It won't. We need to cut down on consumption and we need to do it now. Technology solutions lead us further into the darkness, not into the light.