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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (22573)	7/30/2008 8:12:50 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 36921

We got loads of milk as soon as I was aware of the problem because my mistrust of government people is large and their reassurances meant nothing to me when I could figure out for myself what was probably going on in the atmosphere, rain, crop pollution, cows feeding, polluting milk. In NZ long ago, we had high levels of Strontium 90 thanks to nuclear bomb testing in the southern hemisphere. I wasn't planning on feeding our children radioactive food. I guessed there would be a race for milk so I got in quickly. I can't recall that there was. Most people are amazingly slow to respond to problems, mostly because they don't understand the physics behind things, such as, for example, the Greenhouse Effect. So we had lots of "clean" milk. Quarter of a century ago, I sized up the Greenhouse Effect, figured out some solutions if it turned out to be a problem and pushed BP Oil to adopt my environmental philosophies = investing for environmental protection is a good way to invest as long as the government enforces laws so others have to do so too. Pushing governments for sensible laws, such as get the damn lead out of petrol, was a good idea. It's a competitive advantage to invest for a clean environment because smaller companies with capital constraints and economies of scale problems are less able to meet the new, stricter, standards. Making money from selling high quality petrol is as good as making money from selling grotty stuff. It's better, because people will pay higher margins for better stuff which doesn't wreck their engine with lead, aromatics and gum and which gives them more bang for their buck. I got rid of Eurograde 95, which was intended to be the single European petrol. I pushed for and got BP to go for 98 RON with good quality components for premium vehicles and 91 RON for cheap run-arounds where price matters in a big way. I figured the Kremlin approach of one size fits all wasn't the most profitable way, or environmentally sound way of running the oil industry. The Eurocrats in Brussels were pushing us to have one diesel fuel for all of Europe as part of their dopey state-run unitary standards ideology. I thought we needed lots of fuels depending on the place and time of year, type of vehicles to be fueled and whether it was city or country. Stockholm commuter cars in winter need very different diesel fuel from Spanish trucks driving to Turkey in summer. It's a lot cheaper and more profitable to produce the right fuel. Wax in diesel fuel can be seen as either a bad or a good thing. It's good in hot climates, giving good cetane number. It's bad in cold climates because it crystallizes and blocks fuel flow. A high cetane number is good in Stockholm in winter so cars start well and run cleanly. A low cetane fuel full of gunk is fine in Spain for trucks running day and night non-stop in hot climates across southern Europe. That's some environmental history which might be interesting. Meanwhile, I also decided by 1987 that not only was the Greenhouse Effect not a problem, it is probably a solution, that is, avoiding a return of the ice age. Mqurice PS: I put our cancers down to sun 40 years ago [for two of us] and a combination of bad luck, genetics and something unknown, but possibly heavy hair and scalp bleaching and dying in one case [non-Hodgkins lymphoma] and I have no idea what caused cervical ganglion neurofibroma in another. Somebody has to get the short straw.