Air wars and the future of green tech firms

Right now American regs for air pollution and greenhouse gases are in suspension. You could say they're up in the air. At the center of this air war: the Environmental Protection folks (EPA). The EPA got hit with one new lawsuit this week, and the threat of another. Of course, true to America's schizo body politic, they come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. The folks who care more about public health than corporate profits sued over the EPA's reluctance to rule on whether greenhouse gases should be regulated. The folks who are most worried about corporate health are threatening their own lawsuit over what anti-pollution regs the EPA is threatening to enforce.

We lucky taxpayers are paying all sides. You see, it's 18 states' attorneys general who are suing the EPA, it's another state attorney general threatening the anti-reg lawsuit...and, of course, it's federal attorneys who are defending the EPA. So this air war is starting to look like some of the real wars in the Mideast--we Yanks buy oil from Saudi or heroin from Afghanistan, then that money ends up in the hands of the folks who are shooting and bombing American troops that we're paying for. When do we stop hitting ourselves on the head with a hammer? Not too soon, I fear.

Here's the background on the pro-air suit against EPA. That's been brought on by the EPA dragging its feet after losing a Supreme Court ruling over a year ago. Here's background on the new regs that have some corporate protectors upset. In the EPA's own words.

So while our public attorneys are spending our money fighting each other over the air we need to breath, what's happening on the tech front with air?

One neat idea: clean up the oil most of us use to keep our cars, our houses, our servers, our economy buzzing along at whatever speed we can attain. There's an American green tech company that's developed a patented high-tech method of cracking petroleum, so they can take "dirty" crude oil and make it much cleaner burning. The company is SulphCo, Inc. Its revolutionary ultrasound technology is called Sonocracking ™ and they're starting to sell the process around the globe. SulphCo. is based in Houston, right at the heart of the American oil industry.