Let's Do What Plants Do

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Check this out: those clever little chlorophyll molecules don't just capture the sun's energy, they also concentrate it. In fact, they are far more efficient -- 100,000 times more efficient -- at using the energy than the sun is at making it.

With role models like that, surely humans can find clean ways to make energy and store carbon. Fuels made from biomass are a good start, Morton says. But our best hope is "to find new technologies that sit in the space between the photovoltaic cell and the leaf -- new hybrids of industry and nature. To make leaflike things that generate alternative fuels, or even, conceivably, electricity."

We can harness energy from the sun using photovoltaics, but how can we actually make fuel from sunlight as a leaf does? The answer lies in hydrogen, but to use it, we must split it from water, and that requires energy. Since plants do this splitting masterfully all the time, perhaps we can get plants like algae to generate hydrogen for us. The catch is that breaking hydrogen from water also produces oxygen, which is explosive in a concentrated lab environment. It is preferable and possible, though, to push algae into anaerobic respiration. It's complicated. Good people are working on it, Morton assures us. He doesn't think we'll be too late, but there's no time to spare. 

Morton's urgency is to be applauded, but I'm not sure he has earned my optimism. In discussing solutions to global warming, his focus is just too narrow; he talks about the promise of science, but he's not as well versed in politics and economics. Morton does call for a new Manhattan Project, one that would concentrate huge dollars on energy innovation and set firm deadlines for progress. Even this, though, would not move society away from burning fossil fuels quickly enough.

The failure to act is immortalized in a memorable passage from Cormac McCarthy's novel: "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Thanks to Morton, the ancient mystery of a living planet is now clear to a much wider audience. But its fragility remains. For the planet and its life-forms to thrive, we must learn from the leaf, and we must do it now.