Jed spotted Google's “green energy czar,” Bill Weihl, being positive about cold fusion in the NYT's green blog. Later in the same interview he went on to say:
<<But if it clearly violates the laws of physics, then we’re not interested. If it is something that looks like it has the potential to be really earthshaking, then we could be interested. But unfortunately we can’t fully evaluate all possible technologies, so we aren’t able to make that judgment call on every type of alternative energy. Fusion and cold fusion, for example, are both areas where we felt that we could not develop enough expertise. Furthermore, the amount of money that would be required to make real progress was prohibitive: if we put $10 million into something, well in a couple years they’d need another $50 million, and a couple years after that they’d need another $200 million and so on.>> Perhaps he is open to someone like Jed or Steve pointing out that the investment required to get serious progress in cold fusion/LENR engineering would be highly unlikely to follow the hot fusion model - he has conflated the two "fusions" and thereby written off both as too expensive to risk insufficient reward. If he realised that LENR holds out much better near term promise of a return, he might put the resources of Google into research. Nick Palmer On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it Blogspot - Sustainability and stuff according to Nick Palmer http://nickpalmer.blogspot.com
