A few days earlier in an editorial written for the June 2 issue of  Science Chris Somerville, director of the Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution, and a professor at Stanford University whose research concerns plant cell and molecular biology pointed out that, "In 1895, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, in which he argued that the combustion of fossil fuel would lead to global warming."

Professor Somerville then adds, "the only form of solar energy harvesting that can contribute substantially to transportation fuel needs at costs competitive with fossil fuel is that captured by photosynthesis and stored in biomass. ...the United States currently uses about 140 billion gallons of ground transportation fuel per year, [and] ...the United States could sustainably produce about 130 billion gallons of fuel ethanol [an energy equivalent of ~90 billion gallons of petrol] from biomass.

The vision of approaching greenhouse  gas neutrality for transportation fuel together with a marked decline in dependence on fossil fuels will be to many (if not all) an attractive proposal.

However, professor Somerville is also a realist. "The creation of a new industry on that scale will require much basic and applied work on methods for converting plant lignocellulose to fuels... cellulose is a recalcitrant substrate for bioconversion; [currently] energetically expensive and corrosive chemical pretreatments are required for the removal [of lignins and] yeast currently used in large-scale ethanol production cannot efficiently ferment sugars other than glucose [while] relatively low concentrations of ethanol kill microorganisms, requiring an expensive separation of the product from large volumes of yeast growth medium."

There are "potential solutions, and many incremental advances can be envisioned. However, substantial public and private investment will be needed to meet the nation's goals [but] only about 1% of the National Institutes of Health's budget [is currently allocated as] competitive funding for basic research in plant biology by all federal agencies. Small wonder that we do not know basic things such as the composition of the enzyme complex that synthesizes cellulose."

The director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology, then lays out his hand:

A national biofuels strategy will ultimately depend on massive support for basic curiosity-driven research in many aspects of nonmedical microbiology, plant biology, and chemical engineering. A fivefold increase in federal support during the next decade could readily be justified by the projected economic gains from the accelerated development of a cellulosic biofuel industry. To ensure parallel progress on the many different components of a biofuels strategy, it may be necessary to create a mission-oriented project similar to the Manhattan Project. Indeed, several of the national laboratories that were founded during the Manhattan era also pioneered some aspects of biofuel technology and could be a powerful source of relevant scientific and engineering expertise.

Which nations might seriously consider Somerville's challenge, and might it just be possible for a cooperative international effort to be launched to undertake and develop the research initiatives required?