It is widely recognized that we must transition our energy economies to a greener, more sustainable state. This will only happen through the development of innovative technologies, and as a recent report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) makes clear, trying to force the green transition with government regulations, subsidies, and exhortation will not work. The economic reality is that clean energy technologies must reach price/performance parity with dirty energy (P3).

But as Val Giddings writes for the Genetic Literacy Project, most climate policy recommendations ignore what may well be the most promising source for innovations that will reach price/performance parity: biology. We have said it before, but it bears repeating: novel applications of synthetic biology have considerable potential to deliver lower carbon solutions to climate challenges. This is taken for granted in biomedicine, but for various reasons not so much in other fields.