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?