Quite! And there are other angles. Sometimes the ideas are basically bad,
and any running of logic an numbers can prove it before it gets that far,
and the well-intentioned enthusiasts can loose their shirts and those of
their venture capitalists on them, or outright swindlers can promote the
idea to their ultimate benefit by sucking up fat paychecks while they suck
the company dry, leaving the VC's holding a leaky bag. The same thing can
happen to good ideas, thus discrediting them and depriving society of their
benefits because the credibility of the idea has been sullied by
incompetence, flim-flammery, or both. This sort of thing was rampant just
before the dot-com bubble burst. If one smells gas, light no candles.
Chrysothamnus nauseosus was gonna fix the rubber problem during WW II too.
Somehow, I doubt that a Chicago-sized area would be big enough, and then
there's the issue of which ecosystems would have to be wiped out, a la
switchgrass and other magic bullets . . . It would be cheaper to just pay
off the suckers rather than to lose both their take and the big bucks they
have to "invest" to make the fraud look good.
In Nature, there ain't no free lunch, period. Show me the arithmetic,
please.
I have no comment on the merits of this particular proposal, but no wonder
you had trouble fact-checking it. A little skepticism never hurt anybody
but the egocentric and the pickpockets. Let us pray that the enthusiasm is
warranted--and that there's a warranty.
WT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wirt Atmar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2008 8:42 AM
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] Bacteria make oil?
Melissa asks:
This sounds interesting, but I'm having trouble fact-checking it. Who
knows
about it?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4133668.ece
Here's a slightly more technical article from a year ago that appeared in
Technology Review, an engineering periodical published by MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=biofuels&id=19128&a=
Regardless of the increased prestige of the magazine, you need to be aware
of
the standard pattern inherent to commercial research. It is simply the
nature of
commercial innovation that far more projects fail than succeed, and that
there
is a phase in development where the product under discussion can only be
described as "vaporware," a really cool idea, but nothing that you could
plug
into your computer or your gas tank for years yet.
The "vaporware" phase however is a necessary step that occurs once
sufficient
development has occurred to achieve proof-of-concept, but where investors
are
now necessary to be attracted. It's at this stage that articles such as
these
begin to appear in technical and public publications, but whether the
discussed
product ever actually comes to fruition depends on a great host of things
all
working well, in essentially the right order. But the most important
question
that will asked at every stage of development will be: Can this process be
ultimately profitable? If the answer appears to be no, it will be
abandoned,
regardless of how much investment has been put into up to this point, or
how
much "good" it appears that it might do.
Wirt Atmar
