The world bears the severe burden of a medical tragedy. Huge numbers of humans walk about with their heads on backwards, unable to see where they are going and so become obsessed with where they have been. With technology - Goldberg or Heath contraptions involving mirrors and video feeds - they are able to look ahead but have distorted and restricted fields of view. Objects seen in the mirrors are larger or closer than they appear to be.

It isn't clear if this is a genetic defect or predisposition, or if it is solely a result of environmental factors. Perhaps like most other things it's a bit of all. We can sympathize with the afflicted and help develop prostheses that improve their world views, but we must be firm with them. They are working with bad data and the opinions they form are mistaken.

I mention this since it is relevant to the previous post about energy and the older series of posts about Future Shock and Buzzword Bingo. Oliver posts on the same subject and gently disputes some of the claims. But he supports one of them.

If I were writing Eating the Sun now (Amazon US|UK, since you ask…), rather than a couple of years ago, the biggest difference would probably be that there would be more about food and farming in it. The fact that photosynthesis is where food ultimately comes from is of course there in the book (it’s actually the theme of one of my favorite passages) and agriculture crops up in various places and guises. But it could have been worked in more deeply — something Jeremy Cherfas’s review picked up on — and in today’s climate it certainly would have been.

So this passage in Michael Pollan’s recent piece in the New York Times — a letter to the new president on reassessing the politics, business and culture of food in America — struck a chord:

The core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

This is very backwards looking. You can make a valid argument that solar power is the basis of everything but that requires a galactic perspective spanning billions of years. In local and recent terms it's rubbish. Agriculture has been an extractive activity that mined the earth's resources accumulated over millions of years since the very beginning. Soil, after all, is a fossil too in the sense of not being able to rebuild at the rate it is consumed. It is only in a few blessed places on the planet that the illusion of high productivity without degradation can be perceived. In places such as the Nile Delta - replenished by floods carrying "solar energy" from the heart of Africa to the fields of Egypt - or in the mountains of Tibet where glacial milk - mineral rich melt water rich in nutrients - keeps fields fertile it may seem that there is no mining going on. In other places resources are either concentrated by hauling them in from elsewhere - robbing one spot to enrich another - or the fields themselves move around, exhausting one place after another in hopes that those already wasted will recover over time.

We have significant amounts of recorded history that document these facts. The ancient Greeks exhausted their land, and not for the first time. They complained of their ancestors having ruined the land eons before, and only fallow periods of centuries duration allowed them to be used again for comparatively meager yields. It's as bad or worse in other long occupied areas such as China, over larger areas for as long or longer. But even if we had no documents the tale is written on the land in clear text for those who can read it. Everywhere and every when the sun could not provide. It is only when human or natural forces concentrate that meager input - Nile, Tibet, etc. - that degradation and serial collapse was avoided.

Over time humans became more clever about their methods of concentrating solar energy. They hauled in neglected deposits of stored solar energy - leaves and ashes from forests, seaweed, guano deposits - and dug ever deeper into the earth to find more. With the discovery of the New World these efforts accelerated - burning the forests of N. America for potash, mining the deserts of S. America for nitrates, scraping sea bird dung off of otherwise barren Pacific rocks, and robbing graves for bones to pound into phosphorous rich dust.

Some clever Norwegians even discovered how to emulate lightning, generating electricity in remote hydro systems and discharging it in gasses to create nitrates. Some less clever but more practical Germans then discovered how to make ammonia from the off gasses of coal burning. Methane, natural gas, was cheap and abundant so it came to be the dominant method. It's a fossil gas in huge supply on the planet but also one that is produced in huge quantities on a continuing basis. It's a key part of the natural carbon cycle.

As more was learned about soil chemistry some old questions were answered and old practices were better understood. Phosphorus from fossil bones is as useful as that of any other bone, and is in huge supply buried in the ground. Potash too is available in large buried deposits. All of the primary and secondary nutrients needed to grow plants can be gathered and concentrated on fields to break the old cycle of boom and bust, and since the booms were growing smaller and the busts growing longer this was fortunate.

All of this takes energy to do. But, there is not enough solar energy to do the job, at least not using current technologies. There is enough if we could harness it all, but we can't. Plants are pathetic at this task. They use a low single digit percentage of the available energy when they are at their peak, and are only at their peak for a small part of the time in a small part of the area exposed to those energies. But, humans are clever and can indirectly capture some of the solar energy that plants can't store as mass. Flowing wind and water are a type of solar energy that has long been used, though not with any great competence. Emerging methods using solar cells hold promise.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered and demonstrated a new method for overcoming two major hurdles facing solar energy. By developing a new antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle, the research team has moved academia and industry closer to realizing high-efficiency, cost-effective solar power.

There seems to be a discovery of some sort every week, creating the impression that in the not impossibly distant future we will be able to get closer to living off sunshine. But it will take decades to deploy such technologies across the globe and take huge amounts of energy to accomplish. While that is happening we still must eat, and that will take huge amounts of energy too.

The theoretical truth that it is solar power that is the ultimate source of most everything has no practical application at this time. We should be clear about that. It is not a current political issue. The advocacy to "wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel" is idiotic. It is ignorant at every level. It is typical political mumbo-jumbo designed to deceive society for instrumental reasons so that favored constituencies can rob the pockets of others and free ride on the legitimate concerns of the truly virtuous. It's like agriculture in general, especially organic agriculture: it robs Peter to pay Paul.

We can't change that: life is a process of concentrating energy in spite of the inexorable trend of the universe to become ever more diffuse. You can't win, you can't break even, you can't escape. It's law. All we can do is to become more skilled about it, and getting over juvenile confusions about the process will make that easier.

Update: Correction

Oliver's book, Eating the Sun, just arrived and in the introduction (which I read standing beside the UPS truck that delivered it) it says that Only a small fraction of one percent of the available light is used by plants. I'll take that as given since Oliver is a pretty careful fellow about such things.

I'll say more as I read more.