Anatomy of a Climate Fraud

How to Know When There's No There There

Update: The Solar Panel!

July 13, join us at Manny’s for a night of networking, discussion, and inquiry and hear about the latest trends in the solar industry.

This Week: Anatomy of a Climate Fraud

One of the reasons I started Climate Tech Action Network was that it’s often very hard for people to know what constitutes “high impact” climate technology. On the one hand, you have well-meaning software engineers who want to do things like “build a personal carbon tracking app”, a mostly harmless (if useless) activity. I want those people to understand more about the physics and engineering challenges, so they can choose to put their energy into work that will move the needle.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of money getting thrown at climate tech right now. Many VCs are basically pattern-matching machines, who take money from people seeking high rates of return and put it into companies that other people think are cool. The sector goes through fads, and now that crypto is out, and climate is in, there is a rush to cash in on it by splashing “CLIMATE” all over things to make them more attractive to financiers. For example, the amount of carbon sequestered in diamond jewelry is negligible relative to, say, the carbon footprint of the gold band that it’s set in¹. Making diamonds out of captured CO₂ is cute, but it’s not “climate technology”. Bad money pushes out good money, and another goal of CTAN is to help educate VCs, so that they can choose to fund higher impact ventures (to the extent that they choose to consider impact at all, versus ROI).

Figure 1: ROI Stands for Radio On Internet

On the third hand, there’s also a helping of outright fraud. The dividing line between fraud and mere puffery is a longstanding question in law, but sometimes the fraud is so incompetently executed that it edges into high comedy². Friends, meet Femto Global.

Femto Global came to my attention because someone at their company contacted me four times on two platforms, begging to meet with me while he was in town. This level of persistence (even after blocking him) is unusual, and in a way I admire that kind of chutzpah, so I checked it out. And I want to thank them, because their web page presents a kind of textbook of fraud, and serves as an excellent source of examples of ways to spot fraudulent startup pitches.

One of the biggest tells is that nowhere on their entire website do they explain their technology. The landing page is almost completely devoid of details. The most they say is:

Femto Global is a groundbreaking green energy solution provider that prevents carbon emissions from moto[sic] vehicles. With the help of our innovation, we can eradicate global warming and shape the planet towards a safer and greener tomorrow…Femto Global is an energy-efficient solution provider for your vehicle, that is placed above your fuel tank to improve the fuel buring[sic] process of your engine.

Note the typos, and the facially ridiculous claim that their innovation will “eradicate global warming”. Even if we stopped emitting carbon right now, it would take thousands of years for atmospheric carbon to return to pre-Industrial levels, which is the driver of global warming. No emissions-reduction technology can “eradicate global warming”, and transportation accounts for only about 15% of GHG emissions.

There is a long history of people selling magnets and other gee-gaws to improve gas mileage. “Above your fuel tank” is the dead giveaway here: No changes to the internal combustion engine needed, no need to move away from fossil fuels, just a thingy you can stick on top of your fuel tank. How convenient! Why wouldn’t you buy one? It’s cheap, it’s easy, and even if it doesn’t work, it probably doesn’t hurt. It’s a perfect scam because it promises simplicity in a complex world. In fact, this is a very old scam: magnets, filters, electrical thingies, people have been selling fraudulent fuel-saving devices for as long as people have had cars, and this is basically rehashing a well-worn scam by sticking the word “climate” in front of it.

Figure 2: A typical scam fuel-saving device on Amazon. Did you know that the cigarette lighter plays a critical role in fuel economy?

But that’s not all! Femto Global does so much more!

Figure 3: WTFITS

This is word salad. It’s a bit hard to explain why, for the same reason it’s hard to argue with your QAnon uncle about chemtrails. This is Time Cube levels of loony-tunes. (My favorite part is about how it improves the taste of water.)

But aside from that, the tell in this case is that they claim to accomplish two completely unrelated things using one (unspecified) technology. Anyone who has ever built anything, from a model car to a particle accelerator, can tell you how hard it is to get technology to do even one goddamn thing reliably and effectively. Much of the challenge of climate tech is taking promising technologies and scaling them up. Companies are almost always forced to start small, focus on solving a single corner of a single market, and using that as a test-bed on which to scale up. For instance, manufacturers of next-gen battery chemistries usually focus on a few specific, small-scale applications, like medical devices or small personal electronics, before scaling up to things like laptops and cars. Claiming to have come up with a technological breakthrough that improves fuel efficiency and also, uh, fixes water I guess? Not a thing.

Figure 4: It’s a floor wax! No, it’s a dessert topping!

So, who are the trailblazers behind this double-threat climate tech juggernaut? You will be surprised to learn that this is the work of a lone genius!

You can pretty much say that Femto is the brainchild of Mr. Nandan Kundetkar and the fruit of his 14 years of research and hard work…Through his streak of excellence, he has gathered multiple patent claims in IPTV, broadband media, and data security. He has also used his expertise in the field of electronics, instrumentation, automotive, and the consumer goods sector in India and helped them streamline their operations.

Mr. Kundetkar has been a vanguard of brilliant minds and an eminently respected expert in multiple niche technologies including Femto Technology, space sciences, and theoretical physics.

One thing to look for when evaluating climate companies is whether the team has relevant experience. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. A good team will have a mix of scientific and engineering expertise, someone who knows a lot about the business vertical you’re entering, someone with management experience, and often someone with policy and regulatory experience, since so much of climate tech’s profitability is dependent on regulation and government subsidies. Another thing to look for is whether the team is just a single psychotic narcissist with a website. That’s usually a bad sign³.

There’s a lot more comedy gold on the Femto Global website, but you get the gist of it. I find climate hucksterism particularly vile, because unlike crypto-hucksterism, which mostly feeds off of tech bros and gullible bankers, climate hucksterism is a parasitic drain on efforts to unbork the climate, like stealing international aid from refugees. We don’t have the time or money for mountebanks hawking snake oil. Lives are at stake.

Post-Script

Apparently these clowns tried showing up at my office??? I WFH Friday, so I don’t know what happened except that they were escorted out by security. Stay FAR away from these guys.

1. Gold mining generates about 100 - 1000 kg CO₂ per oz. A wedding band is about 0.1 oz of gold, so it’s about 10 - 100 kg of CO₂. A 1 carat diamond is about 0.2 grams, which would be about 0.75 g of CO₂ . Gold mining also has a number of other awful non-climate environmental externalities. I have been reading Palo Alto, a wonderful history of Silicon Valley, and I learned that the San Jose Mercury is named after the fact that San Jose used to be a mercury mine. Mercury used to be used in gold mining extensively, and they basically just lathered it all over things to catch gold dust, and let it leech into the rivers and groundwater. Also, John Fremont was a genocidal maniac and I cannot believe we still have anything named after him.

2. My postdoctoral advisor was one of the most sociopathic assholes I’ve ever met, and he used to love to use the mandatory daily 9AM meeting to bloviate at a captive audience. Something he used to like to say, when lecturing about how to lie effectively to people (a topic on which he apparently had great experience), was, “A few verifiable facts can often lend the simulacrum of verisimilitude to a lie”, or something similarly ponderous and Machiavellian.

3. Example: Elon Musk and Twitter. Twitter has lost about 2/3 of its value since Elon took over, in part because he fired everybody who knew anything about running a social media platform. Elon is such a master of failing upwards that I am still not sure that he won’t find a way to turn a profit on his Twitter investment, maybe by turning it into 8Chan with payments. But it’s getting harder and harder to see how he’s going to do it.