A reader recently wanted to know why people make money when owning companies that don’t ever make a product. Some companies are scams, that’s how. Look at this post from Twitter/X:
Believing that a 3D printed filter can eliminate 74% of the CO2 emitted by a car’s tailpipe is ridiculous. The chemistry alone is impossible. Plants don’t just convert CO2 to O2. They are doing so because they need the carbon atoms to make other things, but discard the unnecessary oxygen. The carbon gets turned into other things: cellulose, fructose, proteins, and all of the other things the plant needs. In other words, the plant gains in mass by taking in this CO2. The formula is one that is known and taught in high school biology courses.
CO₂ + H₂O + light → biomass (carbohydrates) + O₂
What makes this impossible is the numbers involved. Burning gasoline produces about 8.9 kg CO₂ per gallon. So at 30 mpg, that’s about 0.30 kg CO₂ per mile. To reduce CO₂ by 74%, you’d need to remove roughly 0.22 kg CO₂ per mile. At 60 mph = 1 mile/min → you’d need to remove ~220 grams of CO₂ every minute. That doesn’t seem to be too bad, on its surface. So why is this impossible?
At a conservative microalgae fixation rate of 4 g/L/day, you’d need ~106,600 L of culture. At 1 g/L density, that’s ~107 kg dry algae. That’s not all- that dry algae would need a water bath in order to function. Once the water is added, that amount of algae would have a mass of 107,000 kg- more than 100 tons. Fit in a plastic tailpipe adaptor. Obviously not possible in any practical sense. It’s like discovering your dog eats dog poop, so there’ll be no more dog poop if you just get your dog to eat its own poop.
So these kids are not the first ones to run a scam like this. There is the company website at https://www.gogreenfilter.com/ and they have corporate sponsors, including T-Mobile. They are marketing and selling these things.
Back in 2018, there was a post I did about a Canadian company claiming to be able to make gasoline from CO2. This is what I said then:
This company is hoping that those watching don’t understand the First Law of Thermodynamics. Carbon dioxide is NOT energy. Taking CO2 and converting it into hydrocarbon fuel USES energy. Thanks to inefficiencies in ALL chemical reactions (First Law of Thermodynamics) it takes more energy to create the fuel than the fuel itself contains.
I thought it was a joke, it was so stupid. I thought — it’s junk science, junk commerce, nothing makes sense about it. But look how pretty it is.
About a dozen years ago, there was another college concept where women could paint on a drug detecting nail polish that would change colors when exposed to date rape drugs. A woman could simply stir her drink with a fingertip and make sure the polish didn’t change colors. For numerous reasons this is impossible, but there are sill tons of people out there who are wanting to buy this stuff. I could swear I did a post on this years ago, but I can’t seem to find it. They were collecting funding to get the company off the ground. In other words, scamming investors.
The point is that there are tons of scams out there, and people will happily hand over their cash without bothering to check the claims of the person making them.
If you make a product while making claims about its performance, but you don’t test to make sure the product works as you claim, that is fraud or a scam. If I tell you that I have a machine that creates gold out of lead, then sell them for $10,000 each, but I never test to see if it actually works, that’s a scam. If I collect investor cash to develop this product, it’s a scam.
On the other hand, if I convince a company to fund my development of an idea for a product, or develop some technology with possible future value, that’s R&D. Sometimes R&D leads nowhere, and that is why companies have an R&D budget. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it leads to a dead end.
It’s a line to be drawn- if I tell you up front that this is research of concept, it isn’t fraud. If I tell you that I have a working prototype that I want to bring to market and I don’t, that’s a scam.
13 Comments
Rick T · February 20, 2026 at 11:29 am
Basic science education and a grasp of mathematics are no match for having enough money to bribe ‘influencers’ to shill for your fake product.
The problem is compounded by basic science ed which is worse than useless for learning why perpetual motion machines are all scams, the 100mpg carburetor never existed, why batteries fail in the cold, and all the other Real World reasons most of the Green agenda is impossible.
Anonymous · February 20, 2026 at 3:21 pm
I think a high school science education from the 70’s or 80’s was enough to spot most scams. The trouble is most students don’t care. Today’s curriculum? No idea. Anyone who majored in a STEM subject st a top uni should spot the scammers
Rick T · February 20, 2026 at 11:49 am
The gogreenfilter.com domain registration held by GoDaddy expires 4/4/26 and the web site is hosted by Github.io so keep your eye on those scammers. My bet is they will disappear on April 5th. They may claim to have corporate sponsors but logos are free, and why would a telecomm provider care about this scam product?
Anonymous · February 20, 2026 at 12:15 pm
Take a look at this site: https://bybeetech.com/
Start with his “purifier” product🤣
I majored in Physics with a minor in Chemistry plus a mess of Mathematics. I even threw in a nuclear reactor design course. I spent my career in digital and analog electronics and later primarily software. I have done some mechanical design in the robotics area.
When I come across scams I usually move along quickly without giving them a second thought. I will admit that I have watched a few youtube videos just to look at the elaborate devices that people sometimes make.
I once advised my FIL against buying a small company. They had spent some $140k(in 2026 dollars) making a prototype and getting a patent.The mechanical device they demonstrated and the associated patent had a fundamental flaw that made both basically worthless. I think they were not so much scammers as two regular guys who’s enthusiasm cost them a pile. The scam is that they were looking for a bailout.
Scams usually appeal to a get rich quick impulse or to a something for nothing deal or device. I guess I can understand how it is possible to be drawn in, glad I can spot this stuff quickly.
Anyone want to invest in a free energy device or a 200 mpg carbeuretor for your F350?
Rick T · February 20, 2026 at 2:25 pm
Oh Ghod, audiophiles….. Fools parted with their money for the latest buzz-word bingo winner. Oh, Oh, Oh! Let me pay $5,000 a pair for Quantum Nanocarbon Holographic Oxygen-free BNC connectors for my phase-matched Elemental Silver quadruple-shielded speaker cables…
Steady Steve · February 21, 2026 at 3:31 pm
Did you get the speakers with the Unobtanium coil modulators to go with that? Vast sound improvment.
hh475 · February 20, 2026 at 4:40 pm
I’m not sure that it’s out of the question, though I don’t know what the energy equations would reveal. The key for a lot of this stuff is not just the difference in energy between the first product and the second, but getting in enough energy to get over some hump going from one to the other, using a catalyst. Back when I was an undergrad, I worked on a project where we attached microbial membranes to small beads. We then packed them into a column and forced wastewater through it. On the other side, a number of toxins had been successfully catalyzed into less toxic chemicals. That kind of thing *did* become commercial in the realm of membrane bioreactors.
In fact, the basis for this work is stuff done by Isaac Berzin, and has been deployed successfully on a large scale to clean effluent from power plants (see: https://web.mit.edu/erc/spotlights/alg-all.html ). So, the basis for this in concept is good.
The problem is scale and deployment to an unfriendly environment. Photosynthesis uses solar energy to drive this, and the blurb from the competition they won says they use it. That’s great for algae cultures in big tubes outside at MIT. It’s a different problem for small tubes and hot exhaust. While they probably *did* get 74% reduction in CO2, I suspect it was in a low flow toy system that wasn’t subjected to a lot of heat. But… those are engineering problems, not problems with the basic science.
C · February 20, 2026 at 12:59 pm
So….
Step 1: Start up phony eco-green company with no actual working product.
Step 2: Scam the commies and hippies.
Step 3: Use their money to fund far right nationalist candidates.
Step 4: Buy a helicopter.
GrayDog · February 20, 2026 at 4:30 pm
The good news is that these little con artists will probably only be able to prey on Democrats. Who are afraid that global.climate.change™ (or an extra battalion of marines) is going to cause islands like Guam to tip over and capsize.
John in Indy · February 21, 2026 at 3:31 am
Woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, read this article and the comments, and am feeling stupid, probably about a misplaced decimal point.
Your postulate formula has the CO2 from a gallon of gasoline weighing 8.9 kg. A gallon of gas weighs about 2.9 kg. How is this result possible?
Thanks. I will stop bothering you now.
Divemedic · February 21, 2026 at 6:49 am
When it burns, it combines with oxygen from the air. In one of the chemistry classes I took in college, we did an experiment where we burned magnesium ribbons. We weighed the magnesium before it burned, then weighed the ashes after, and used the difference to calculate the mass of oxygen. Of course, you get some insensible loss from the smoke that escapes, but it’s still pretty close.
In the case of gasoline, one gallon weighs about 6.3 pounds, but when it burns, it combines with about 19.9 pounds of oxygen. 87% of the mass of a gallon of gasoline is carbon, and the remaining 13% of it is hydrogen. Perfect combustion of gasoline leads to CO2 and H2O as the product. Of course, it isn’t perfect due to impurities in the process as well as incomplete combustion (which is where the CO comes from) but that is the theoretical outcome.
Joe Blow · February 21, 2026 at 9:55 am
How many billions did that tart in a Steve Jobs Turtle neck con Wall Street investors out of? You know, the pretty one, who could deduce 18 billion facts and test results from half a drop of blood without using a needle?
Sucker born every minute… I still can’t believe that one got past the DD of investment houses, but it did!
SiG · February 21, 2026 at 11:23 am
This triggers my memory of the most surprising quote of at least the last month.
Most readers will know Emily Compagno, a regular personality on Fox News. She’s a lawyer who was an NFL cheerleader for years.
She opened a reply on “Gutfeld!” – a comedy show – by stating the first law of thermodynamics, not by name but by saying, “energy can not be created or destroyed …” I was shocked. A lawyer knows that and knows it’s relevant? A lawyer who looks like a magazine “cover girl?”
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