Oh Cool. So if I almost rebrand a failed patent application as “green” it can now get it approved?

Oh Gary Locke, since everything is negotiable, can you also double the patent length for me also? Pretty Please?

“Patent Office Decides To Rush On Green Tech Patents, Rather Than Give Them Scrutiny They Deserve”

That’s because the patent office doesn’t care about the environment.

What business would implement a patented product and pay huge royalties just for the sake of saving the environment if it’s more profitable to implement a less environmental friendly product instead? Most corporations won’t, that’s for sure. They don’t care about the environment, they care about their bottom line.

I just don’t see how patents on environmentally safe products make sense. If someone does develop an environmentally safe product they know they’re not going to get monopoly prices on the invention because no business would implement it since it doesn’t provide any benefit to them (only to the environment and what do businesses care about the environment).

and to lobby the EPA to ban competing non – patented products creates a conflict of interest between environmental safety and profits, it creates an interest in ensuring that only products that are best for ones profits margins, PATENTED PRODUCTS, are legal, and I don’t think we should live in a world where the environment has to face such conflicts of interest (just look at this whole new climategate scandal. To say that politics doesn’t play a role in what’s decided to be best for the environment by lawmakers is nonsense, and to put patents in the picture will further distort the science). Studies will likely be manipulated and censored, there will likely be a bias to only publish studies that agree with what’s best for the profit margins of the rich, and the environment will likely suffer as a result. Do we really want patents to screw up the environment like they basically screwed up medicine and just about everything else?

Fast tracking is not as important as not being afraid to issue patents. Examiners are afraid of Quality Control. QC makes its production by finding any errors in allowed applications and by calling the errors, serious errors. The Examiners have a reason to be afraid. This is the problem with the PTO.

Energy is not like information technology. There is an enormous reservoir of unimplemented invention, which has been all ready to go for many years. More than that, there is an enormous reservoir of inventions which were put into production and sold in a modest way, thirty years ago or more. Unemployed high-tech people are moving into energy, but a lot of them are doing so in inappropriate ways. They want to make something which looks sort of like a computer, because that is what they are familiar with. I expect that most of the patents will be for Rube Goldberg contraptions which may get government funding, but which will not work.

I had occasion to look up production figures for geothermal heat pumps recently. I found that there are sixteen companies making the things, with a total production of less than a hundred thousand units annually, and virtually no imports. In short, we are talking about something very close to handcraft productions, with the inevitable high costs which go with wholesale use of hand labor. The figures for solar water heaters will be approximately similar.

Let’s construct what an imaginary hypothetical case might look like. In a fictitious small town, somewhere in the Midwest, there is a fictitious company which produces solar water heaters. The company employs about two hundred people, and produces ten thousand solar water heaters a year (forty per working day). These solar water heaters cost two thousand dollars each, so the company has a revenue of twenty million dollars, or a hundred thousand dollars per worker. Let us say that the company started operations in 1974; during the last energy crisis, and achieved a stable, well-functioning design by 1983; and has produced, over its lifespan, 250,000 solar water heaters, of which 150,000 are still in service. Sales are running above historic levels at the moment, for the obvious reasons.

The design is a conventional and obvious one, of the type which _was_ actually published in Popular Mechanics_ during the late 1970’s. It consists essentially of a solar collector; an insulated hot water storage tank with a heat exchanger and an electric resistance element for fallback; and a circulating pump and several thermostats to control everything. There is nothing much in the design which would not have been immediately obvious to a notable nineteenth-century inventor such as Thomas A. Edison. It works. It generates enough hot water, even during a Midwestern winter, and it does not break down very often. The main problem is that this solar water heater has a relatively high price. Given that the fictitious company only produces forty water heaters a day, there is very little scope for automation. The workmen use acetylene torches and pneumatic jackhammers, but otherwise, the plant has a strong family likeness to a nineteenth-century boilermaker’s shop.

The solar water heater competes, if one may use that word, with an electric or gas water heater which one can buy at Sears or J.C. Penney for two hundred dollars, but which consumes several hundred dollars worth of gas or electricity each year. From an economist’s point of view, this ought to be a no-brainer, but the man in the street is not an economist.

The customers for solar water heaters are not very price-sensitive. They are mostly more interested in being “greener than thou,” rather than actually saving money. The fictitious company finds that its most successful dealers seem to be located in the more famous college towns, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan; Ames, Iowa; and Madison, Wisconsin. The company does not employ anyone with experience of international business, or anyone who speaks Chinese. The company doesn’t even compete with the European market, or the Southern California market, because the climates are so different, and consequently, so are the design criteria. For a variety of reasons, the company has never succeeded in selling to the tract-house builders who account for the vast majority of hot-water-heater installations. There were tentative approaches in 1978, and again in 1993, but these fell through when the actual limits of the Carter and Clinton administrations’ power and/or commitment became apparent.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to deal with ways and means of scaling solar water heater production up from the thousands to the millions. I think you will find that you can get manufacturing costs down to two hundred dollars or so by manufacturing in China, and at that point, installation expenses will become dominant.

Something similar applies in transportation. The basic fact about transportation is that at a certain point, one has to build roads. Here is a link to a review essay of sorts which I wrote about electric cars:

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/adtodd1a/blog_01.htm

I don’t think patent issues will be very important to practical solutions. The Patent Office will grapple with the issue of whether it is obvious to treat an electric car like a cellphone, but of course, this is a dumb idea in the first place.

I agree that we can’t count on fast-track patents to assist the green economy. There is already a huge amount of information out there about the new green collar economy and the many companies who are taking advantage of this unique opportunity and very few are being hindered by the patent laws in place. The website http://www.greencollareconomy.com has a directory of thousands of businesses who have embraced this new market and are bringing these products – and jobs – to regions throughout the country, at record speed. If we are to remain a global commerce leader, we must educate ourselves about and act upon the vast potential before us. At http://www.greencollareconomy.com there are also a number of white papers that demonstrate the opportunity we have to create a green economy and examples of those who are already moving toward this market in full force. I encourage readers to take a look and learn more about the green collar economy.