Published

1 year ago

December 28, 2024

Alice Rush

Here’s an investment “opportunity” for people who don’t understand that:

1) Biodegradable plastic has been the object of scientists’ attention for at least half a century.

2) “Water-soluble” plastic faces a number of challenges. One is based on the fact that plastic bottles normally contain liquids that are mainly water. Sure, we don’t want our plastic bottles to last 1000 years, but precisely how soon should the degrade? If we’re talking about milk, which goes bad in a week or so, the answer might be a month or so. If we’re storing drinking water an emergency, we don’t want the bottles to fall apart for at least a few years.

As we encounter so frequently, this is just another attempt to rip off ignorant people.

Biodegradable Plastics

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

7 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.