Company Holds Solid Piece of Climate Change Solution

[ NASDAQ: CLIR] I happen to be lucky enough to live in a place where the coffee shop conversation can be very interesting, due to the proximity of a brain trust university, MIT. One senses as one walks the halls of the Infinite Corridor, a marble and granite temple to perfect math SATs, that behind one of these doors some kid is fine-tuning a bunch of vacuum tubes he has jerry-rigged into a time machine.

"We're f*cked!" a kid was saying behind me, as I munched my hummus and pita, to his two friends, all of whom probably had a combined IQ just shy of half a grand. "The window for drastic cutbacks was like, 5 years ago! Even if you mandated greenhouse gas reductions right now people wouldn't do it fast enough, and it probably wouldn't matter even if they did!"

I recognized the topic immediately. Climate change. It is happening. It may be partly man-made. And it will be bad. For everyone. Wars will be started over water. As for the super-storms and extreme weather we have seen to date, as Woody Harrelson said, you ain't seen nothing yet. I try not to think about it too much anymore because as the kid said, we're effed.

Everything I have read on the subject tells me that he was right. Ask people in Norway, whose permanent glaciers have melted. Only we in the tropics and temperate zones don't know it yet, in the gut and before our eyes. But we will. When it's too late.

"The only possible solution is to go into warp speed and design something which actually sucks CO2 out of the air! Is that crazy talk?" His young colleagues, struck into thoughtful silence, both said no.

He was saying this is where we are in global warming and climate change. It's too late, if we rely on politics and ordinary shortsighted human behavior, An Apollo mission is needed. And our best brains are up to it.

Fortunately, one young company has patented what would constitute another part of the solution. ClearSign Combustion Corporation {CLIR] has designed a novel way to reduce some greenhouse gases, like NOx and CO, by designing a cleaner burn. It's whiz-bang stuff, but basically magnetic fields are used to control flames precisely, so fuel gets burned more completely, resulting in fewer residues. In a nutshell it's cheap, it works, and because it burns fuel more completely, it is efficient. The word revolutionary which is used by ClearSign's marketing is not out of place. This not a marginal, but an orders of magnitude improvement over present technology, which usually seeks to remove pollution once it is created.

Better yet, it has been tested in the real world, in numerous installations.

ClearSign seems moribund at the moment, trading in the $2 a share range down from $5 at IPO. It is low on cash and has announced no new big contracts. That doesn't mean none are in the works, but that is guesswork.

Management is heavily criticized in the financial Internet, and a new management may be due. It seems they have figured out how to make air clean, but not how to make money.

All those "clean clean" coal plants that Trump was delusionaly talking about - coal-fired electricity, at present, is anything but clean - could become much closer to a reality. The problem is Trump doesn't seem to be the type to care much about pollution. So a federal push for broad installation of the new technology is unlikely.

Which leaves it to China, again, already leading in wind power and other renewables. For China it is not an option. They are choking to death, rich and poor alike. Exxon has gone sniffing around the company, according to the financial press, for a possible buy-out or partnership. A behemoth like Exxon doesn't show interest in a $50 million pipsqueak unless they know it works.

For a businessman, Trump is remarkably clueless about the commercial potential of renewable energy, and is stuck in the "burn baby burn!" mode of energy production. Ceding the lead in the technology of the future to China is a dumb business move. The petros may be gone sooner, or they may be gone later, but they will be gone.

The technology sits in a magic nexus for commercial success. It is cheap. It is patented. It is adaptable to many industries, from incinerators to factories and electricity plants. It can be retrofitted to old plant. And it is proven in the field.

By the numbers, 6% of todays man-made greenhouse gas emissions consist of NOx, and ClearSign's technology could remove a good chunk of it. Combined with other pollutants it removes, the technology could, if installed worldwide, reduce made-made greenhouse gas additions to the atmosphere by almost 10% overnight. The benefit would be disproportionate to removing an equivalent amount of CO2, because the nitrous oxides have a much longer lifespan than CO2.

That would be a good down payment on mankind getting serious about this.

As for carbon dioxide, which is 64% of greenhouse gases from peoples' activities, the first thing everyone can do is plant a tree. In order to make a significant impact on man's carbon footprint, every American would have to plant on the order of a few hundred trees, preferably fruit or native broadleaf, since trees absorb CO2 and release oxygen. Of course a much easier way to increase trees is to stop massive and ongoing deforestation, mostly in the Amazon region.

Then, for the rest, we should start a crowdfunding project. $1 million prize for the best working design for massive CO2-sucking machines, either at the pollution source or from the air in general. The young visionary in the Cambridge coffee shop was right. Free enterprise meets saving the world. We can do it. Stick the first crowdfund poster right up in the Infinite Corridor, and pull that kid off his time machine.

Disclosure: The author is long CLIR.