Mark & P.R. Mantis's blog

A Naturally Sweetened Energy Policy

Here is an idea for a new energy policy: teach people what energy is and where it comes from.

Whether or not you think human activity is effecting global climate change, whether we should drill-baby-drill or hug a tree, a nature-based perspective of the challengingly intangible concept of ‘energy’ may help you better understand your political position.

First of all, what is ‘energy?’

The answer may depend on whom you ask. If you pause for a moment and think how you would put it into words you may find it isn’t so easy.
- A physicist will tell you energy is ‘the ability to do work’ and then she’ll ask you what kind of energy you mean.
- A long-distance runner might tell you energy is in the pre-race food that gives you the kick in the final lap.
- A holistic medicine practitioner may tell you energy is a force we all possess but rarely realize… or something like that. 
- An oil company executive might tell you it’s what makes our country work.

I think energy (of motion, at least) is like the current in a river. A floating seed can get from one place to another by riding that current. The current also pushes the water with it and so we can see it moving. But the force moving the water and anything in it is the energy. Of course, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but simply, if things are going to happen, energy is involved.

We feel the Sun’s energy as heat. We even know it is powerful enough to burn us sometimes. Imagine two ice cubes sitting outside on a cool day – one in the Sun and one in the shade. You can guess without even doing it that the one in the Sun will melt faster. We know intuitively (and because we learn it at a very early age in some rote, abstract form) that energy comes from the Sun in the form of heat. But it also comes in other forms.

The energy moving your eyes back and forth reading this comes from the Sun. I think most people with a general understanding will accept this fairly readily. It’s a nice story. But few make the connection that the energy that boils the water for your tea, or makes your toast in the morning or powers your car and computer, also comes from the Sun! (That is at least when the source is coal, oil or natural gas.)

For living organisms, the most important Sun energy is delivered with light waves. And that's why everybody needs plants.

What’s so great about plants?

The really incredible thing about plants is their ability to directly convert light energy from the Sun into useful, chemical energy. The implications of this single fact are almost immeasurable. The remarkably elegant system that moves that energy around the vast majority of life on Earth is a woefully underappreciated phenomenon.

Plants get the short end of the stick.

Think about the things we’re taught about plants. Not much drama. Not like spiders sucking out the guts of flies or whales communicating across oceans! But we are told almost unbelievable ‘scientific facts’ about plants and we’re told we should respect them.

I was talking to some school kids about trees. We were looking at a book that had a photo of huge trees, with a person standing in front of them – a very small looking person. It’s hard to impress upon kids (and, I suspect, many grown-ups) what it means to be alive for five hundred years – or a thousand! That’s not to say it would be so great to live that long, but, imagine! And these things live among us…

We learn that plants have roots, stems, flowers, fruits and leaves, they take water and nutrients from the soil, get pollinated by bees, and they photosynthesize – do photosynthesis. And we learn photosynthesis has something to do with being green (although not everything green can do it!) And it has to do with making energy from the Sun – or making food from the Sun – or something…

If we get far enough along in science class we learn that plants are ‘autotrophs’ (self-feeders), and animals are ‘heterotrophs’ (other-feeders). The difference is a question of how we obtain energy for life. If we are going to grow and move and reproduce and do anything at all, we’ll need energy from the Sun. You could lie on the beach all day, and while you might get burned, you won’t get a single piece of Sun energy you can use. But plants can. We have to eat plants, or animals that have eaten plants, to get our energy for life.

Every student learns the happy story about plants and us. We breathe out Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) and breathe in Oxygen (O₂), while plants take in Carbon Dioxide and make Oxygen for us! It’s sweet. You can put a couple of little birdies in the sky and a rainbow, too.

The Happy Carbon Dioxide-Oxygen Cycle

Seriously, though, it is a very nice lesson. It shows plants and humans being connected and dependent on each other. It teaches a little chemistry. And it describes a natural cycle. All good.

But this lesson misses the whole point – the “breathing” and “giving” are just by-products of what is really going on. 

The Sun’s energy is being moved around and used.

And the simple CO₂/O₂ cycle also overlooks an even more enticing offering from plants: sugar! 

Plants get some of the light wave energy in sunlight and using special chemicals and reactions, convert it into energy that can hold the bonds of a sugar molecule together. Amazing!

Sugar is the thing that ‘carries’ energy around while the energy helps get all the work of life done. It’s like the water in the current. Once it gets used by all the living things it passes though, it just slowly slips out into space as heat.

Okay, please bear with a small amount of chemistry. It really helps with the story…

Sugar is a “Carbohydrate” which means it is made out of Carbon and Hydrogen and Oxygen (‘hydro’ or, water). When six Carbons and twelve Hydrogens and six Oxygens are put together into one molecule (C₆H₁₂O₆ – Glucose), they are able to ‘store’ energy in their chemical bonds. Glucose is usually shown in chemical equations as a hexagon and each corner is one of the 6 Carbons. 

(Here is where the picture with the tree comes back in!)

The Essential Glucose Cycle

 Remember, plants use the CO₂ we exhale and they get water (H₂O) from the ground. This gives plants all the stuff they need to make some C₆H₁₂O₆’s!  (Glucoses!)

Glucose sugar is a good energy carrier for a couple of reasons. In terms of biochemistry, Glucose is a very simple molecule. It only requires three, very common elements, Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. That means it doesn’t take a lot of chemistry or coincidence to put these things together and take them apart again. That’s important. Also, Glucose is a fairly stable molecule - it doesn’t just fall apart easily.

Another really useful thing about Glucose is that you can build with it. It joins together with other Glucose molecules – and other things, too – to make a wide variety of valuable carbohydrates, like cellulose, starch and sucrose (table sugar). The word ‘polysaccharide’ means ‘many sugars.’ The capacity to build more complex molecules out of this simple one increases the ways the energy captured in Glucose can be moved around and stored until it is ready to be used! 

Oh – and it tastes good! 

When we get the sugar that we eat, our cells ‘burn’ it with the O₂ we’re breathing in (that we got from the plants!) This breaks the bonds holding the carbons together, releasing the energy so it can help us do other stuff, like try to understand this! And keep our bodies a comfortable 98.6^oF, give or take.

Biochemists call this process of getting the energy back out of the bonds in Glucose “cellular respiration.” It isn’t the same as just breathing (respiring). Cellular respiration is a series of elegant chemical reactions in most of our cells that combine to break up the 6 Carbons in each Glucose molecule to release and gather that energy into a form we can use.

When our cells break up a Glucose molecule, C₆H₁₂O₆, we end up with a bunch of C and O, that make the CO₂ that we breathe out, and a bunch of H and O for the H₂O we can fog a mirror with when we exhale water, too. (Actually, the H has a more complicated role to play - life does a lot with Hydrogen.) The key here is getting use of that Sun energy. Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen are just packing materials!

All of this happens so we can use the Sun’s energy to do our work. 

What does this have to do with politics? (Personally, I think it is much cooler than politics!)

If we, or some other animals or fungi or something, don’t eat that plant with all that energy stored in its sugars, it dies. Scavengers use some of the energy and recycle the raw materials. But some of it is ‘trapped’ in this dead, organic matter. This is the driver of the Industrial Revolution! Coal and natural gas and oil (which means plastics and so many other things, too) have value because of this trapped Sun’s energy.

Our technology has enabled us to replicate ‘cellular respiration’ in many ways. Staring with fire (maybe before that, but I cannot think that hard!), and all the way to the moon (!), we have been violently releasing the energy in the bonds of Glucose, stored in the depths of the Earth. But our planet's living systems scheduled this energy for a slow, gradual release.

I suggest perhaps we replicated the wrong process. We only thought it half way through. We thought like animals! Had we thought like plants, we would have founded all these unimaginably creative and profoundly essential technologies on replications of photosynthesis – not cellular respiration.

Instead we took an understandable out-of-sight-out-of-mind policy. We thought we didn't really have to understand it because those things are really old. Our limited understanding of the systems of which we are a part has often led us to Gods and poor choices. 

Had we understood that Glucose was the key to the energy puzzle and that the charming CO₂/O₂ cycle wasn't really worth much, we might not have disregarded the value of managing all the steps of this energy usage. The drill-baby-drill approach we’ve taken since the days of slash-and-burn energy policies overloads the system with energy that is designed to be time released. The rate this Glucose should be broken down and the Sun’s energy released from those bonds is more aligned with you walking to the grocery store than driving there (wait, not to the store… more like out to the backyard).

So, I think this is why, when pressed, I’d have to say I am an advocate of solar power. Although, I think we should look to the solutions plants came up with millennia ago. I have heard people argue that the surface area required to convert enough energy photosynthetically for any practical use makes it unlikely to be of any value. And I say, c’mon! We can do better than that! 

I mean, can't we do any better than plants? 

COME SEE THE BUGS!!!!!!
Finally! The BUGS will be on display in all their amazing glory on this Friday night at the Worthington Community Center! We'll have our awesome BUG-Observation Station set up for about 2 hours starting at about 7.

Here are the details....
Friday, January 22, 2010 6:30 - 9 pm Worthington Community Center - Family Night
345 East Wilson Bridge Road Worthington OH, 43085
6:30-9 pm

Here is one of the Best BUG Stories I have… well, one of them anyway!

My first ‘official’ very, very cool BUG experience was a field trip to Andros Island in the Bahamas. It was Winter break in 1986. And it was amazing!

One of the most interesting times of the trip was the day we went to Owenstown, the former logging village owned by Owens Illinois. It was then a “ghost town,” abandoned in the early 1960s when the Bahamian government outlawed logging of Bahamian Pine. Bahamian Pine was highly sought due to its natural pest resistance and hardness. Andros Island was an ideal spot to manage shipments of this commodity to the United States as it was the largest land mass in the archipelago, very sparsely populated and the last land before the US mainland. Andros also is engraved with numerous inlets from the ocean they called rivers.

In Owenstown, they had build roads up to the rivers and a small cluster of buildings to house the loggers and the work of shipping the wood. When the logging stopped, the locals scavenged the material Owens Illinois didn’t take with them, and by the time we got there, Nature was scavenging the rest. There were concrete foundations among the remnants of cracked roads and scrub. We were exploring for large centipedes, spiders, crickets and other open area BUGS like that.

There were about seven of us wandering this area in groups of two or three. We had arrived on the back of the pick-up truck we used to get ferried around the island. The plan was to explore for a couple of hours and meet back at the truck around noon for lunch. The habitat (and the classroom introduction to it we had received that morning before heading out) was making me feel a little nervous walking around out there!

We hadn’t been out more than 15 minutes when we heard shouting and noticed our guides back at the truck, waving their arms over their heads to signal us back prematurely! There was a very large, yellow backhoe next to the truck, with a native guy driving it. Clearly, we wanted to know what was going on, but we were hushed and hurried onto the back of the truck.

The big, yellow backhoe led us down the road a short way to a roadblock made from old, wrecked cars, piled three high across the road! As you drive around the island you see wrecked cars along the roadways regularly as they do not have adequate junkyards for them. People’s cars die and they just get out and walk! The backhoe driver used his big shovel to clear the cars on one side so we could pass, replaced the barricade, and returned to the site. We continued on at a fast pace until we came to another, similar roadblock of cars. With no backhoe in sight, we had to figure out how to pass this obstruction. The road fell off to either side into a ditch and it didn’t seem we could just go around. A few of us ended up rocking the cars on the end back and forth until they slid over enough to creep the truck past, nearly toppling it off the road.

Back at the field station, our local guide explained the native man had said two white men gave him $2000 to block the road so nobody got in and nobody got out. Apparently, in the absence of the logging company, the commercial pathways Owens Illinois created were being exploited for the illegal drug trade. Out little entomological expedition had happened upon one of their transfers. It seems they drop ‘cargo’ from low-flying planes (you see crashed fuselages all over the place, too!) into a convenient area like Owenstown and then load it onto boats to smuggle into the United States mainland.

We only got to leave because our guide explained we were only students doing some field research and didn’t know anything about anything. I guess the native man forgot to mention the second pile of cars!

So, I guess this story is more about drugs than it is about BUGS, but it was still a memorable experience!

Share your best BUG Experiences on our Facebook Page!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Columbus-OH/BUGMAN-Educational-Entoprises/130990366739?v=app_2373072738#/topic.php?uid=130990366739&topic=11812

Mark & P.R. Mantis

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