Environment & Energy

Most of nature stores energy chemically in the form of sugars, starches, fats, oils… After your body digests your food, it stores that energy as sugars, fats… it uses this stored energy to power your muscles, your brain &c.

Nature can (and does) make electric storage batteries. An electric eel has a series of natural batteries that it uses to deliver a powerful electric shock, but it doesn’t use batteries to swim around.

Green plants use solar power to almost magically transform CO₂ & H₂O into a wide variety of more complex molecules. Naturally, they first need to break down the water and carbon dioxide, producing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. From there, they release the oxygen, and use the carbon and hydrogen build sugars, fats, oils… which they can later break down (using atmospheric oxygen) to recover energy at night or during the long, dark Winter.

We could do the same

Some years ago, it struck me that “deciduous” trees invest a great deal to produce “leaves" (solar powered chemical processing facilities) which they discard after a few months (after recovering valuable resources from them, causing them to change color and dry out.) They apparently found this to be a more profitable way to live rather than to attempt to maintain them through the dark and frozen Winter (as “evergreens” do.)