Published

9 months ago

May 27, 2025

Alice Rush

When 2GreenEnergy was launched almost 16 years ago, the idea of collecting waste tires and subjecting them to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen (“pyrolysis”) to convert them into valuable commodities was very attractive. I worked on several different business plans that sought to make this happen at scale.

Not one of my clients was able to get the funding to move their idea forward, however, and at this point, one hears very little about the subject. As is so often the case, the economics of all this just failed to pan out.

If the price of gasoline or jet fuel had risen considerably, waste tire would have had a happier story to tell. Equally effective would have been large dumping fees associated with landfills; that’s where all these tires are going today–gradually decaying, and polluting our atmosphere.

Waste Tire

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

18 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.