Douglas Schorr

It’s the gas of our life.

How little I knew, how pitiful King Charles III’s comprehension remains. While managing his vast estates with net-zero ambitions, he seems to have forgotten his own wisdom—how the plants he sang to grew best. With each princely breath he exhaled, he sent those lucky plants into an ecstasy frenzy. For Carbon Dioxide isn’t just another gas—it’s the gas of life. Without ‘enough’ CO2, plants die. When they do, so does the Animal Kingdom. And that includes us.

Let’s breathe in some facts: Every minute, we take about 14 breaths of air. That air is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and varying amounts of water vapour (3.75-5%). There’s also a splash of argon. But CO2? It’s so rare that we measure it in parts per million (ppm)—currently in the low 400s. Compare that to water vapour (the king of greenhouse gases) at 37,000 to 50,000 ppm, or oxygen at 210,000 ppm.

Though Mars might be Plant Heaven with its atmosphere of 95% carbon dioxide, here on Earth CO2 is precious. It wasn’t always this way. Rewind 2.4 billion years, and you’d find very little oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. Then simple plants stumbled upon photosynthesis—the greatest chemical reaction discovery in our planet’s history. Now as they inhaled CO2, they thrived like never before and released oxygen as their waste product.

“And released oxygen” is worth an extra thought: how can something so fundamental be so amazing? Here’s why. Most of Earth’s oxygen isn’t just floating around free in the air—it’s busy working in infinite compounds, in the sea, soil—everywhere. We owe our survival to plants, which have been faithfully producing the “free” oxygen we need. This remarkable partnership helped our species grow from perhaps just 150 individuals to today’s 8 billion in a mere 6 million years. Okay, in return, every one of us is breathing out CO2, and that’s nice! And plants would be insulted if you wore a Fauci mask.

The fascinating fact is apropos energy plants are eons ahead of us animals. We need to source and physically eat stuff that our stomachs prepare for complicated conversion into energy inside our bodies. Over billions of years of evolutionary tinkering, plants became super-efficient energy makers and users. Magically they ‘eat’ CO2 and, using just light and heat from the sun, create all the energy they need. Think about it: they’re 95% of the biomass of Earth, and without taking away from the splendour of mountains and valleys, plants are the makeup of our beautiful world. No wonder Musk’s Mars Movement is massive—they understand plant power.

We humans need 6-8% oxygen minimum to survive, and plants have been our reliable oxygen suppliers for 800 million years. Yet now these plant champions are struggling.

For a brief golden age about 50 million years ago, Earth was a natural greenhouse. It was very much warmer, CO2 levels were perfect for plant life at plus 2000 ppm, and the planet bloomed. But since then, we’ve been on a long cooling journey, and CO2 levels have plummeted. Just a couple hundred years ago, CO2 levels flirted with 200 ppm.

At 180 ppm, plants wither, and at 150 ppm, they suffocate. We came terrifyingly close to this threshold during our last glacial period.

Kuala Lumpur’s garden—a precious stretch of protected equatorial jungle that I live on the edge of—stays perpetually green because plants, tall and small, efficiently capture every CO2 molecule they can find, powered by 12 hours of sunlight and tropical heat. But look far north into cold Kent in the UK or south at cool Grahamstown in South Africa, and you’ll find even more robust plant growth—in greenhouses. There, elite gardeners and commercial growers purchase CO2 and pipe it in to maintain CO2 levels above 1200 ppm, and the construct of the greenhouse ensures higher temperatures. While plants thrive at around 2000 ppm (nearly five times our current atmospheric levels), 1200 ppm has proven economically optimal.

Earth is greener now than it’s been in 400-500 years. Consider China’s remarkable desert greening projects—how much is Eastern ingenuity, which is undoubtable present, and how much is simply increased CO2 availability? We’ve experienced a near doubling of CO2 during our current interglacial warming period. But weather analysts suggest this warming reprieve may not last much longer. They suggest real data indicates temperature peaks will not match previous highs; soon (perhaps as soon as when my newest grandchild reaches my age), we will continue our long-term cooling trend from the Eocene Thermal Maximum.

The recent CO2 rise conveniently aligned with our industrialization, but it’s presumptuous to claim it’s all our doing. In the grand cosmic scheme, the slightest change in deep space affects our orbit around the sun— that’s the real climate driver.

In gratitude, please keep singing to your plants. They’re evolutionarily far ahead of us animals, and all they need is a good, CO2-rich atmosphere. Water and fertilizers are welcome extras, not a requirement. Now here’s a thing—there is so much gold we hide it, and supply grows at 3% pa. Since 2000, the global life-giving CO2 average has grown by 43.5 ppm. As net-zero policies force submission to misinformation, the smart money will sell gold and buy CO2.