Jordon Peterson’s meteoric rise as a public intellectual started with his refusal to accept gender pronouns. To be precise it started when Canada introduced legislation that would make it a criminal act to not use the pronouns a given LGBTQ+ person would want to be addressed with. His particular point was that he wouldn’t mind accepting someones idiosyncratic linguistical wishes so much, but would oppose vehemently if that wish were a trojan horse to politically f… with his mind in an Orwellian sense. So far so good, but what in the heck, all this has to do with photosynthesis?

Well there is no politically correct law about the colors of energy sources yet, but unwittingly society has come to a complete Orwellian reversal of the use of the word “green”. At some point in time we have come to call types of energy production green that do not emit the single and only gaseous substance that promotes plant growth and greening. At some point governments around the world have started paying subsidies to types of energy production that do not directly (they do indirectly) emit the only truly greening gas on the planet.

Youtube abounds in video instructions for how to make your own home greening gas producing set-up to make your aquarium plants, houseplants or your home-grown cannabis grow better and faster. In the Netherlands there is a pipeline from Shell in Pernis straight to the greenhouses of 500 flower and vegetable growers in the Westland. It was cheerfully opened by Queen Beatrix on the 7th of august 2005. A good innovation since before growers had burnt the cheap subsidised Dutch natural gas in their heating installations even in the summer. With the roof windows wide open to prevent overheating and the exhaust on the inside to get the heavy clean greening or growing gas close to the plants.

How potent this greening or growing gas is, can be seen in the video above with the beautiful music that has been sitting on Youtube for 11 years now. In the pre-industrial era there was only 280 ppm of this gas in the atmosphere we think to know and this is dangerously little above to the 180 ppm threshold for all plants to literally die off. This gas is naturally absorbed in the weathering process of rocks and so will naturally decline towards catastrophe anyway.

Historically there pretty much always used to be much more of this gas. Especially in the times in which flowering plants evolved, after 120 million years ago, it used to be around 1400ppm, which, not surprisingly is also the optimum for these plants to grow at. Most of our fossil fuels have been deposited in the period around 300 million years ago, which has led to an extreme drawdown of the greening gas in the atmosphere as can be seen clearly in the graph. Luckily the concentration recovered after that. Otherwise we probably would never have had flowers and leaf bearing trees in the first place.

More recently plants have undergone a mutation to be better able to withstand the recent reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, where recent means over the last 100 million years.

The C4 plants have evolved in order to cope with the dangerously sinking concentrations of greening gas. A dutch botanist, a professor at Wageningen University, once told me that over the decades he could personally see that in Dutch wild nature C3 plants are relatively gaining again due to the very recent increase in greening gas. For agricultural crops this doesn’t matter since we weed out undesired plants anyway. But just to give you an idea: rice, wheat, oats, cotton, tobacco, sugar beets, and spinach are some examples of C3 plants. Maize, sugarcane, and sorghum are examples of C4 plants.

The big looming question is: how have we come to think badly of this greening gas? I am reasonably certain that this is due to a very bad grasp of chemistry and mathematics and natural sciences in general both amongst politicians and the public. There is even a certain pride to having been bad at school at these subjects. People boast about it and plentiful law degrees are the result! So now in the Netherlands we have a lot of turmoil about the new EU compliant nitrogen policies. Half our farms have to be shut down for some illusory number of something people barely understand. Anglo-saxons probably are not aware that the Dutch and German word for nitrogen is literally “suffocating substance” (stikstof).

When the scottish Scientist Daniel Rutherford discovered this gas in 1772, having a mouse quickly die in it, he in English called it “mephitic air”, which means toxic air. It was also called “azote”: not sustaining life. The experiment with candle and plant shows that this air is not toxic at all but just lacking oxygen. The English then adopted nitrogen from the French, in whose language “nitre” means saltpeter. So the Dutch had better called this gas “nitrogas” as well or even metaphorically “neutralgas” (colorlessly, odorlessly providing 80% of the atmosphere). But nitro is better since that also tells us that we can use this gas to chemically produce the fertilizer that has saved hundreds of millions of lives. In that case would we 250 years later have had a Minister for Neutralgas as we currently do have our Minister for Suffocating Substance? It’s the same with carbon dioxide. The Dutch and German names are literally “coal acid” and “coal acid gas”. That doesn’t sound too nice. But even the english name scares the sh.. out of people since it sounds much like the highly poisonous carbon monoxide and even like the much hyped environmental poison dioxin.

In the video above – also 11 years old – two guys go around on an environmental demonstration with a petition for banning dihydromonoxide. And everybody is happy to comply and sign off on the banning of … water. And if you don’t laugh already at this point, let me remind you that water is H2O: dihydromonoxide. People have just no idea. Oftentimes I ask climate alarmists to just simply give me the build-up in the gases of our earthly atmosphere. Or the relative concentration of CO2 and how much is in our breath. Or I ask them what the most potent greenhouse gas of them all is (it’s water vapor). People don’t have a clue. So maybe it’s about time to make things clearer to people. Wouldn’t it also be helpful if we attributed to each gas and each related energy source an appropriate color just in order to help them memorize it better?

Let’s start with the color green as in “green energy”. There is really just one candidate of atmospheric gas to be called green and also just one source of energy. The gas is carbon dioxide. It’s so green in the sense of enhancing plant growth and greening the earth that it had better be called greengas or growing gas in the first place. What energy source corresponds to this simple truth? It must be the source that emits the most CO2 right? And that’s coal. We must add clean coal since unfiltered coal burning leads to smog and less solar irradiance reaching the plants. Yet, asking for clean coal is like asking for education without physical punishment for kids. Some countries maybe need to be reminded of this but in the west this is a standard to such a degree that we might omit the clean and simply say: it’s coal stupid! Gas, oil and gasoline burning also emits CO2 so let’s call those light green. Dark green is coal. It’s a bit of a no brainer also since the emitted CO2 is simply the recycled form of what was taken out of the atmosphere back in the devonian and carboniferous periods, building those massive deposits of coal.

But doesn’t CO2 emission lead to warming and the melting of the ice caps and therefore sea level rise? Ocean acidification? The latter let’s simply brush aside by noting the current unprecedented (pun intended) flourishing of the Great Barrier Reef and the above mentioned CO2 fertilising technique for aquariums. The former? Maybe. But that wouldn’t change the color of this emission and this energy away from green. It’s a bit far fetched to call coal a blue energy source since it causes sea level rise. Firstly it is not 100% proven and secondly the greening will be more noteworthy than the blueing of a few coastal areas. But isn’t it really bad when New York and The Netherlands get wiped off the map? Of course! But we have dikes and we should focus on the right colors here. Not the types of disasters. The only appropriate color for coal fueled energy is green. Period. Green energy is coal energy. And all other forms of energy are by definition less green.

So what colors should we pick for renewables then? And for nuclear? I didn’t deeply brood on this yet, but I have some ideas. Wind could be called “transparent energy”. Wind and solar jointly could be called yin and yang or black and white energy. Because they are intermittent and would force us to do a lot of things only when the wind blows or the sun shines. Hydro is blue of course. Nuclear we could call silver, since the mined form has a grey-silvery color. Or “ungreen”, since it doesn’t help green the earth. Nuclear fission I would say is white energy since it is the same energy the sun emits nonstop day and night. It’s just us earthlings that experience the sun as intermittent. So in that sense we could really clear things up and give people who hated science in school a more honest and realistic common sense language back.

It is nowadays quite common to see outdoor advertising for green energy that in one image shows both a fully CO2 dependent leaf often almost zoomed in to the chlorophyll level and in the same image something with an energy form that doesn’t emit this growing gas. Naturally I object to phantasia land gender pronouns. Luckily I’m not in academia and I’m hardly ever confronted with their absurdity. But when I see images like the one above, Orwell’s 1984 is already here. Also in the sense that 99% of the population is OK with it (aka brainwashed). To me such an image is as absurd as showing a caring mother smothering her baby with a pillow. Or a living fish on top of a mountain. Or a panda bear in a washing machine. The dishonestly, the stupidity of such an image to me, is a heavy curse on God’s creation.

The Smithsonian in 2022 published this article Is Hacking Photosynthesis the Key to Increasing Crop Yields?. It confirms the problems of C3 plants to cope with the current low amounts of CO2. Remember that back in the 1900’s at the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) when Arhennius was the first to postulate a possible CO2 driven greenhouse, he was optimistic about it since it would both enhance plant life and make the earth warmer. But now we live in a time in which black is green and “CO2 is Hitler”. We must now hack plants to do with less greengas. A normal person not overly into chemistry and biology is certainly not capable of unwinding this linguistic gordian knot.