30 Fortune Cookies: more aphorisms, diversions, caveats collected along Biofuels Road

Time for more Fortune Cookies – aphorisms and entertainments that came to mind, here in Digestville, as we reported on the fast-growing biofuels industry.

Early last year, we published a collection of 100 “Fortune Cookies”. It is the zeitgeist of the times, we suppose, that short and peppy sayings that can meet the 140-character Twitter limit ended up being more popular than some of our more lengthy screeds on policy, technology or finance.

Last Year’s Collection

Back then, you enjoyed items like “Before embarking on a biofuels venture, chew and digest a car, just for practice,” “If you are thinking long-term, think about it in Mandarin,” or “someone in the oil industry is laughing right now at your concept of scale.”

Now, this year’s spring collection, prêt à porter

We hope that you will find our latest serving of fortune cookies, listed in alphabetical order, both tasty and nourishing.

1. After 200 million years of testing, plants decided it was easier to make sugars than oils.

2. Algae are not puppies, they are little wolves.

3. Ask not what the oil majors can do for you, ask what you can do for the oil majors.

4. Beauty is in the eye of the debtholder.

5. Before you invest, check the mass balance.

6. Before accepting a new investment, remember that “whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death”.

7. Beware of that express lane, it usually has limited exits.

8. Bow to your partner, do-si-do.

9. Darn it, why can’t microorganisms understand plain English?

10. Don’t expect a government hand-out, or a hand-up, but if you expect a hand-slap, you might be pleasantly surprised.

11. Energy of the community, by the community, for the community.

12. Every feedstock will eventually be expensive.

13. If you think about it, you never hear an offer for snake oil these days, but there are an awful lot of gasifiers around.

14. In a Moore’s Law environment, the number of suckers born every minute doubles every two years.

15. Incentives are like people, cutest when they are young and small.

16. Indirect land use change is caused by land zoning, not crop prices.

17. It is always cheaper to hunt and gather than farm – you have to frame the oil argument another way.

18. Open pond systems are the wild, wild wet.

19. Opponents don’t really want biofuels to exist without subsidies, they want biofuels to go away.

20. People are looking for their opportunity, not your opportunity.

21. Life hath no greater mystery than the the innermost conditions of a  million liter fermenter.

22. There is no green premium, just a green pillory you get to sit in once in a while.

23. Value is found upstream — unfortunately, like, er, Colonel Kurtz.

24. Vocês serão mais felizes se você compreender o que isto diz

25. What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar, and a good 5-cent sugar, and isn’t going to get either.

26. You can think win-win, but did Genghis Khan?

27. You can never be too salt-tolerant.

28. Your customer is an engine – know it.

29. Your enemy is entropy.

30. 99.999% of the planet’s people have no idea who you are, or why you matter, and won’t.