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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (4065)	2/7/2006 1:12:07 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 217795

CB, I should have added that ethanol might be used in fuel cells, but as a guess, knowing next to nothing about fuel cells, I think it's better to use methanol, though my confidence rating out of 10 on that thought is about 3. Yes, some oils are thick in cold weather. They are all solid in cold enough weather. That's a major issue with diesel fuels in places like Canada where normal diesel freezes and blocks filters and pipes. It's the wax in the diesel which freezes first and flows along to the filter, where the flat plates of wax act as an excellent blocker. So they add cold filter plug point chemicals which make the wax crystals stay tiny, thereby reducing filter blocking until some lower temperature. Or, they can add solvents, like gasoline [which makes for more hazardous operations and reduces engine function]. Vegetable oils are produced mostly in warm climates, so the plants don't need to worry about freezing. But fish do. So, fish cunningly produce those good oils which are good for us as well as which stay nicely liquid in zero degree Celsius water. I don't know why coconuts, walnuts and other nuts and soybeans and canola and corn and other plants produce oil. They seem to like to do it, so it must be for a very good reason. Strawberries and other plants produce fruit so we'll eat it, and the seeds, then walk away and poop the fruit and seeds out somewhere else, giving the plants a wide range and excellent survival prospects. I doubt that plants produce oils so we'll eat their precious babies. Once the nut is eaten, it isn't going to grow. Maybe squirrels collect them, bury them, and enough survive by being lost to make it a worthwhile deal. Plants produce flowers, nectar and pollen to get the bees to do the dirty work of mating for them. They produce poisons in their bark and leaves to stop anything eating them. They grow spikes to stop animals eating them too, or even bumping into them, or climbing around in them. They attack other plants in territorial warfare, and grow taller to get the sun and stop the other plants growing. They have developed highly sensitive CO2 receptors to survive in the highly depleted C02 atmosphere - fortunately, humans drive around in dirty great SUVs and 747s and are digging loads of oil to fuel them, spraying CO2 into the atmosphere and rebuilding CO2 levels, albeit too slowly to be of much use, but maybe fast enough to stop the next glaciation which could well have been the final runaway global freezeup, leaving an icy dead ball floating for a billion years until the sun turns into a red giant. It's very hectic in the plant world. Plants and people are symbiotic, working together to rule the world and roll back the ice-age, saving the planet, not to mention all those bludging ingrate other species which just loll around all day hassling us, such as mosquitoes, fleas, tigers, great white sharks, leeches and other nasties. I suppose they do help produce CO2, so it's not as though they are completely useless, but their contribution of CO2 is only after they eat herbivores, who do the real work, so they really are no use at all. Mqurice [PS: some of the above is not totally rigorously scientifically tested with double-blind data and confounding variable adjustment]