North Star Writers Group

In honor of this year’s Earth Day, which falls on April 22, a modest proposal to help solve the twin problems of pollution and dependence on fossil fuels:

Let’s look again to the basics – the basics of creating food energy, that is. The process is known as photosynthesis. All green plants do it. They take in sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and rearrange it into glucose (sugar) and oxygen. The plants then emit the oxygen, enabling all creatures, including the human kind, to breathe, and use the sugar as their fuel. Plants in turn become fuel for those creatures that eat the plants, and the creatures that eat the plant-eating creatures, all the way up the food chain.

Without photosynthesis, life as we know it on earth could not exist. Photosynthesis forms the foundation of life by converting sunlight into an energy that all living creatures can use.

For about five decades, we human creatures have been trying to convert sunlight directly into electricity through a process called photovoltaics. Most solar cells in use right now have efficiencies ranging from 12 percent to 18 percent. The efficiency rating measures the percentage of sunlight hitting the cell that is actually converted into electricity.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced late in 2006 a breakthrough solar cell that is 40.7 percent efficient, but it will be some years before such cells can be manufactured in sufficient quantities to make them affordable for commercial purposes.

Perhaps we should back up a few steps. Instead of trying to go straight from sunlight to electricity, maybe we should try to replicate actual photosynthesis under artificially created plant-like conditions. NewScientistTech.com recently reported that UC Santa Barbara scientists have figured out a way to use the humble sea sponge’s ability to harvest silicon from seawater to devise a low-energy means of producing solar cells very cheaply. Why not harness photosynthesis in a similar commercial capacity to produce basic food energy?

One big advantage of doing so would be in the area of fuels for transportation. Changing on a mass scale from fossil fuels to ethanol or any other grain-based fuel source would disrupt the national and possibly the global food supply. It won’t help to switch our cars, trucks, planes and trains to run on plant-based fuel if doing so drives the price of food skyward because arable land that used to be reserved for food is diverted to ethanol cash crops.

Another advantage would be the byproduct of photosynthesis – oxygen. Imagine generating more oxygen, not to mention using up carbon dioxide, in the process of creating a chemical energy, glucose, that could then be burned to create electricity or converted into a transportation fuel.

None of this would be easy, nor would it happen with a snap of the fingers. Photosynthesis is a complex and subtle process not yet fully understood. But it’s worth a shot if it could become the foundation of a sustainable, renewable, and above all safe, basic energy source.

What we don’t want in this rush to curb greenhouse gases and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is a return to nuclear energy - despite the growing media and political cacophony in favor of restarting construction in this country of nuclear power plants.

Why not? Oxford Research Group, a U.K.-based nonprofit think tank, in March issued a report decrying the push to expand global nuclear power generating capacity, predicting that it would make efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons far more difficult; increase the risk of nuclear terrorism; make a negligible short-term contribution to lowering CO₂ emissions and make a negligible contribution to energy security.

On top of that, existing U.S. nuclear plants have churned out more than 30 million barrels of high-level nuclear waste. After decades, we’re still debating how best and where to dispose of this deadly stuff. No one wants to live close to a nuclear waste disposal site, which is why most spent nuclear fuel remains in vulnerable holding tanks on the site of existing power plants.

More nuclear power plants, in other words, will cause more problems than they solve.

Again, back to the basics. If green plants can photosynthesize, surely we human beings have the ability to acquire this skill as well. The fate of the earth hangs in the balance.

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