Letter to one of the many readers taken in by the Discover Magazine article called
"Anything Into Oil" on magical solutions to the non-existent "problem" of garbage:
I was extremely disappointed to see you giving publicity to an article about thermal depolymerization creating fuel oil. You should be more critical in your assessment of wild claims in the environmental field.
This whole "field" ( I am loathe to so dignify it ) started with a company that embarked on a fraudulent program to milk the public of its tax funds by idiotic claims which had the great advantage of promising a gullible public exactly what it wanted to hear. They claimed that they could (1) get rid of all garbage without the burden of any intelligence or responsibility and (2) get a free unending source of energy. This specious fraud had the good fortune (from the point of view of the snake oil salesmen involved ) to be uncritically picked up by Discover magazine over a year ago and granted a euphorically adoring article which conned a generation of environmentalists and is apparently going to cast its fraudulent ripples in ever widening circles. In the course of that article, they selected "Thermal Depolymerization" as their genie in the bottle which needed merely to be rubbed to create a cornucopia of gifts. As a chemist, depolymerization is, to me, a perfectly ordinary chemical process possessing no allure or mystery. Apparently to a public with hardly any decent scientific education any more, it is romantic and pregnant with magical promise. In the course of the article in Discover magazine, we learned many interesting things. We learned that 100 pounds of undifferentiated garbage could produce 150 pounds of clear, golden fuel oil, in contradiction of the laws of conservation of matter. We learned that even refrigerators, by the application of this fifth dimensional force could be turned into golden fuel oil. We also had the chance to take note, if we could be so cynical, that no one reported or claimed that they actually saw the Rube Goldberg machinery pictured actually produce anything. God forbid someone would have inspected it, or asked one single incisive question, or run any tests. All we were told was that the Oilmeister with a huge grin produced the finished oil in a flask for journalistic inspection. Was that a partial can of Pennzoil 30 weight I noticed him holding behind his back?
The success of this bogus demonstration is unbelievable. Is there nothing too outlandish, absurd, self-contradictory or medieval for the American public to swallow. I offered to do an expose for Skeptical Inquirer but they demurred. Too technical I assume. Are there no technical skeptics left. Thank goodness the Patent Office long ago was forced to reject all Perpetual Motion machines, otherwise we would be installing one in every "environmentally clean" vehicle.
In the Discover treatment, turkey guts were only a portion of the input, and that viewpoint persists also in the Fortune article: "The company says its process works on tires, various hazardous wastes, and plastic as well as heavy metals." However in order to try to pass the laugh test, they are now concentrating on turkey guts. As if there were ever any problem grinding up and steaming the animal fat out of turkey parts - excuse me depolymerizing it!
Has anyone ever challenged a single one of the idiotic and grandiose claims of these turkey oil salesmen? Apparently not. They seem to be unstoppable, with their claims of millions of dollars of investment from every gullible company they report. I have no information about this, but I suspect that big companies are just a bit too canny to throw millions of dollars into such a technically juvenile scheme. They still employ chemists, last I heard. But gullible journalists - no end to them.
-- Paul Palmer, Ph.D.
