When the light shone on the greenness, the greenness welcomed it, and comprehended it, and put it to use. The greenness was chlorophyll, a pigment. It was arranged in pools and the sunlight’s energy bounced from one molecule to the next like a frog across lily pads before reaching the subtle trap at the pool’s centre, the three-billion-year-old trap where the light of the sun becomes the stuff of the earth.
As you can see, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet is not a typical science book. We attended Morton’s keynote address to the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy two weeks ago, remarking then that we found the speech “inspiring.” (We also said that this piece would appear on Bostonist last week, but were beset by delays caused by the holiday and runaway FedEx trucks.*) Given 400 pages to expand on that speech, Morton keeps up the same optimistic tone throughout, capturing both hope for the planet’s future and the joy of scientific discovery.
Those of you reflecting on your high school bio days may recall that photosynthesis is not exactly the simplest process to describe, despite its fundamental influence on everything we see around us. However, Morton skirts this dilemma by describing the chemical machinery of plants and algae through the lives of the people who discovered it. Using this technique as well as some fanciful depictions of the processes of life (as seen above), and some subtle self-referential humor (much like that of your humble Beaker Hill columnist, but not nearly as random and silly), his excitement about his subject comes through crystal-clear on every page.
The book is essentially divided into thirds, with the first section describing the process of photosynthesis, the second detailing how the action of plants has changed the history of the planet (for starters, by making it livable for the last several hundred million years), and the third showing the successes and failures of our own efforts to shape our blue and green sphere. But despite a closing chapter which talks about our environmental impact, Morton maintains his positivity from start to finish. We were thrilled to have a brief transatlantic chat with him earlier this week to discuss the book and his thoughts about our future.
One of the ideas that captivates Morton is the potential for conventional solar cells (photovoltaics) and novel designs based on photosynthesis to complement each other. While photovoltaics themselves have progressed rapidly over the last decade, he says that “with the exception of Moore’s Law, it’s nearly impossible to find…business technology processes with that sort of exponential growth over that length of time.” Introducing the cheap, though inefficient, natural processes used by plants may provide a way to continue this development. “A photovoltaic cell is very difficult to make because you need a very high-purity material, whereas a leaf is very, very easy to make. Any old plant can make a leaf out of pretty much anything that’s lying around.”
However, he cautions, as he did in his speech at the conference, that no single technology is going to be a cure-all. “It’s fine for people to be really enthusiastic for their own technologies. Everything needs championing, but the problem is when you get into this…internecine warfare where people start trying to pull down other promising but imperfect technologies on the basis that they’re competing for funds.” In the book itself, he uses the concept of seven “wedges” between stabilizing carbon emissions at today’s levels and continuing to increase at the current rate, with a reduction by 2050 of just one wedge requiring a substantial investment and development in technology to be achieved. It will undoubtedly take a full fleet of new ideas to go through all seven.
Regarding synthetic biology (which, you know, we covered right here on Bostonist), Morton thinks that it may provide some near-term solutions in making biofuels more efficiently. “If you just want to make simple chemicals, biotechnology gives you quite a lot of power. Synthetic biology gives you even more,” he explains. “In terms of turning biomass into biofuels, you can imagine that synthetic biology might be making quite a big difference quite quickly.”
And as Morton discussed in the book and in his speech in Boston at great length, the key to energy development in the 21st century is a reawakening to the nature of energy as part of a process, not something derived from a fixed source. “We have come through a century where…pretty much all the energy story can be solved with digging more black stuff out of the ground or pumping more black stuff out of the ground. We can’t live like that anymore…we have to see that energy is not a matter of finding a fuel, it’s a matter of tapping a flow. There are all sorts of energy flows around us, and all sorts of different ways to tap them. That’s the 21st century agenda.”
* Boston: a walkable city where pedestrians' lives are constantly in danger.
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