The Thing About Green…

A few weeks ago someone from our company posted on their LinkedIn profile something about Hydrogen fueling stations for Hydrogen cars claiming Green Hydrogen. (I wanted to hyperlink to that post but the LinkedIn website is quite limited in their search capability).

That got me thinking… How Green can Hydrogen be as a fuel source? My conclusion, not very. In my mind, it distills down to how do we get the Hydrogen? Is that process Green?

Hydrogen (H2), the lightest of elements, is essential to Life. Its name comes from the Greek hydro and genes which means water forming. Without water, we have no life. Chemists have figured out a whole lot of useful things that we can do with H2.

Today we get H2 by doing a lot of work to strip it away from its attachment to Carbon. Nature makes Hydrogen to hook up with Carbon to give us HydroCarbons: Methane (CH4), Ethane (C2H6) and so on. Nature stores a log of energy into these HydroCarbons. We, humans, work to strip this H from its link to C and use the resulting energy. That is essentially how we power our economy.

It’s a good thing that evolution is a slow process. This gives Nature a head start. Over millions of years Nature does its thing deep inside the Earth applying pressure and heat over a long time to “fix” energy into the Carbon-Hydrogen links.

Over the hundreds of millions of years, evolution slowly “fixes” intelligence into primitive life forms. All this time, the energy “fixing” is happening. Over time, the slow process of evolution “fixes” enough intelligence to trigger a
“Huh??” moment to notice fire. Then an “Aha!!” moment happens and the pieces start falling into place:

It takes an elevation of Consciousness for a “Huh?” moment to transform to an “Aha!” moment!

It takes an instant, a spark, to release energy that nature has stored over a long long time!

The price we pay for this mismatch between the quick rate of release and the slow rate of fixing of energy is pollution.

Now you see why H2 just can’t be Green Energy. It comes hand in hand with pollution.

We have the answer staring us in the face! It’s been here all the time. In fact, it started the whole process in the first place: Photosynthesis — The Ultimate Green!

Photosynthesis is the manifestation of Quantum Mechanical Phenomena at normal temperatures! It tooks us a long long time to finally figure this out!

Light gathering macromolecules (which is a fancy way of saying complex organic compounds with many Carbon-Hydrogen-Oxygen-Nitrogen links) in plant cells have chromophores (responsible for the color of the molecules) attached to proteins which carry out the first step of Photosynthesis: Capturing Sunlight and Transforming its Energy Efficiently.

This is the key to Green Energy: Nature knows best. It has figured it out. Now it is up to us to let evolution propel us to the next Consciousness Elevation to replicate Photosynthesis: The Ultimate Green Energy!

So, plants fix sunlight to energy (Carbon-Hydrogen bonds). Animals eat plants to transform this primary energy into secondary energy. Humans eat animals to transform this secondary energy to tertiary energy! This makes no sense!! Why do we, the so called intelligent species, choose to get our energy source from secondary energy rather then primary energy?

In our primitive evolutionary phase, this was natural to do: We could not cultivate enough plant matter to sustain us so we assimilated animals who could directly assimilate plants. But today, we have evolved enough to mass cultivate plants! What’s our excuse now? Why are we still going after secondary energy sources?

Plants solve our biggest pollution problem: Energy Pollution —

The meat processing is the single most polluting industrial process overtaking even the oil industry. This is incredible! Think about this for a bit. We cultivate secondary energy sources (animals) which need the primary energy source (plants) which we also cultivate but we choose to consume the secondary energy source rather than the primary! Huh? Evolution? Not!

Go Green. Literally. We’ve got to save this third rock from the Sun. It’s all we got.