Watch Out for That Tree! The Journey to a Cleaner Economy through the Jungle of Hype and Stealth

July 01, 2025

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Second, the more dramatic the promise, the more disenchanted we become when reality fails to keep up. If you were told something was going to change the world by next Tuesday, and instead it merely improved a process by 10%, it can feel like nothing happened at all.

The truth is, the incremental is often the most important. But the incremental doesn’t always photograph well, doesn’t headline well, and certainly doesn’t fundraise well.

A few phrases to watch for when evaluating hype:

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These words aren’t inherently dishonest. Sometimes they are accurate. But more often, they are a sign that the narrative is sprinting several steps ahead of the technology.

When that happens, the merely good is overshadowed by the promise of the perfect. And when perfect inevitably fails to arrive on schedule, good gets thrown out with it. So, perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of good. But boisterous claims often are.

Here are just a few of the technologies where narrative velocity has repeatedly outpaced reality.

Biochar

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In reality, biochar does help—sometimes quite a lot. But its benefits are variable, slow to measure, and stubbornly local. And every time the promise outpaces the practice, disillusionment follows.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is like the James Bond of defossilization: always coming back for another seque

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To this day, hydrogen has real, important applications—especially in refining, fertilizers, and potentially long-haul trucking or steelmaking. But every time it’s marketed as a universal energy carrier, the reality of thermodynamics shows up to wave its skeptical hand.

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Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles have finally become mainstream—an undeniable accomplishment. But it’s worth remembering how many exaggerated promises got us here and how they distorted perceptions along the way.

Consider a few specifics:

Battery Lifespan

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was routine to see projections that battery packs would last 500,000 miles, within a few short years. In reality, while battery longevity has improved significantly, degradation remains a challenge, especially in harsh climates or for vehicles subject to frequent fast charging.

Charge Time

Early narratives promised that “ultra-fast” charging—refueling your EV as quickly as you fill a gas tank—was just around the corner. A decade later, the reality is:

- Fast charging infrastructure is still limited outside urban corridors.
- Even with DC fast chargers, many vehicles take 30–60 minutes to reach 80%.
- Frequent fast charging can accelerate battery degradation.

Rare Earths and Critical Materials

Many of the early forecasts also underestimated how hard it would be to secure the supply of critical minerals essential to electric vehicles. While lithium and cobalt get most of the headlines, a typical EV battery and drivetrain depend on a suite of materials, including:

- Nickel – essential for high-energy-density cathodes (like NCA and NCM chemistries).
- Graphite – the primary material for the anode, much of it synthetic and produced in China.
- Manganese – used in cathodes to improve stability.
- Neodymium and Dysprosium – critical for permanent magnets in high-efficiency electric motors.
- Terbium and Praseodymium – additional rare earth elements that help maintain magnetic strength at high temperatures.

Most of these rare earth elements are not truly rare in terms of absolute abundance, but they are dispersed at low concentrations, making them expensive and technically challenging to mine and refine. Today:

- China dominates processing and refining capacity. Estimates suggest China controls about 60–70% of global rare earth mining and over 85% of refining capacity.
- Western mining operations have struggled to compete. Even well-known projects—like Mountain Pass in California—have been buffeted by price swings, environmental hurdles, and supply chain complexity.
- Efforts to onshore processing face significant cost, permitting, and community opposition challenges.
- In other words, while press releases described the rare earth challenge as a solvable sourcing problem, the reality is that these materials are a strategic chokepoint in electrification—and their development timelines are long, capital-intensive, and fraught with risk.

Subsidy-Driven Markets:

A great deal of purchasing activity, particularly in Europe and China, has been propped up by:

- - Direct purchase subsidies.
  - Tax credits.
  - Company car incentives.
  - Regulatory mandates (e.g., California’s ZEV credits, China’s NEV quotas).
    These policies have been effective—but they also mask the question of what true market demand would look like at unsubsidized prices.

Predictions vs. Reality:

From 2010 onward, forecasts routinely declared that by 2020 or 2022, EVs would be cost-competitive with combustion vehicles, with range anxiety fully solved. Instead, EVs remained a premium purchase for many buyers, with true parity arriving slowly and unevenly across segments and markets.

None of this is an indictment of electric vehicles themselves, which represent one of the most important industrial transitions of our time. But it is a reminder: When the narrative says “revolution” and the reality delivers “steady progress,” disappointment is inevitable—even when success is happening.

Performance Woods (Lignostone, SuperWood, and friends)

Wood densification is not new.

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Yet here we are in 2025: mainstream press treating it as something never before imagined. It’s the classic pattern, reframing incremental progress as a radical reinvention, selectively omitting historical context, and amplifying the hype cycle.

When incremental improvement gets wrapped in the narrative of a second Industrial Revolution, it’s hard to appreciate steady gains. And when factories don’t materialize at the promised speed, it feels like failure—when it might simply be slow success. There are four recurring dynamics:

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Why Don’t Commentators Connect the Dots?

For one, few reporters read deep trade literature, journals, patent applications and peer reviews. But, to be fair, there’s more. Symbolic drift occurs: as the same concept is re-described, its identifiers mutate. E.g.: Laminated densified wood → engineered wood → Superwood. And, there’s entropy export: The act of simplifying the story for new audiences discards nuance. That loss is the price of speed.

Too many meaningful but incremental scientific advances are announced like the invention of the wheel — what happened? The symbolic compression strips out all context. This pattern not only runs risks for investors and supporters, it runs risk for the technologies themselves. We are all drawn into the black hole of failure by the gravity of this approach.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

If all this sounds inevitable—if you believe every new technology must be announced in a frenzy of superlatives—consider how Michelin has communicated the development of 5-HMF, a promising bio-sourced molecule.

In May 2025, Michelin announced an industrial demonstration plant for 5-HMF in France. The press release is worth reading in full because it offers a model of narrative discipline:

Instead of calling the molecule “game-changing” or “revolutionary,” Michelin describes it as “a platform molecule” and “an essential component of green chemistry.” To be fair, these phrases are still somewhat aspirational. But they are specific, technical claims about how the molecule functions and where it can be applied—not vague declarations of instant transformation.
Instead of claiming overnight adoption, they detail the specific production capacity (3,000 metric tons annually) and the need to license and scale additional facilities over years.
Rather than promising instant market conquest, they project a potential European market of 40,000 metric tons by 2030—a cautious, plausible number.
They acknowledge prior setbacks: an earlier attempt with another partner failed before joining forces with IFPEN.
They credit public co-funding but don’t pretend the government will buy the end products.
They describe the project as an enabler—a foundation on which applications can grow—not a magic solution in itself.

This approach does not diminish the technology’s promise. If anything, it increases credibility. Investors, industrial partners, and the public can see clearly:

What is proven.
What is still uncertain.
What it will take to get from demonstration to industrial scale.

This is what a healthy narrative looks like. One that is hopeful, but conservative about velocity. One that frames promise, advises of risk, and invites participation without hype.

It is a reminder: technological progress can be communicated in a way that builds durable trust instead of fleeting excitement.

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A New Symbolic Language for Technology—and a More Courageous Development Ethic

If there is one lesson in all these stories, it is that the problem isn’t just too much hype—or too little disclosure. It is the mistaken belief that either narrative overreach or narrative lockdown will protect a technology. It never does.

Overreach—the language of revolution, game-change, and miracle—alienates stakeholders when reality unfolds at its natural pace.

Lockdown—the language of stealth, control, and secret readiness—isolates the technology from the thousands of partners, regulators, customers, and supply chain allies it will need to scale.

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What stealth mode usually means is tight control of the narrative. It is a strategy to avoid questions until later. Yet the fantasy of control often prevents the most essential work of all: building the village around the technology—the network of allies who will help it survive first contact with the market.

It is, in many ways, a form of unintentional arrogance—the idea that success is primarily about the brilliance of the technology itself, rather than the thousands of small acts of participation and collaboration that make any project real.

Toward a New Symbolic Framework

The antidote to hype is not secrecy. The antidote to secrecy is not hype.

What we need is a new symbolic language and encoding framework—one that:

Frames promise without promising inevitability.
Describes progress in language that is granular, cautious, and affirming.
Makes clear what is proven and what is still speculative.
Embeds the project in its ecosystem early, with the humility to acknowledge that even great technology will fail without the patient work of cultivating the ecosystem.

A Proposal for a New Narrative Ethic

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This language is not designed to make projects look smaller. It is designed to make them look real.

Why This Middle Path Is Better

Technologies that choose this path—transparent but disciplined, hopeful but humble—will outlast those that rely on either theatrical hype or strategic opacity.

This is because:

They attract investors who understand the time horizons and risks.
They build trust with regulators who will need years to clear a pathway.
They surface supply chain challenges early, when they are cheaper to solve.
They create room for non-financial collaboration—standards, siting, logistics—that stealth mode never solves.

A New Kind of Preparedness

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Tarzan didn’t rush blindly. He climbed higher, looked further, and issued a call that was distinct, structured, disciplined, and consistent. His yell wasn’t just noise—it was:

A declaration of presence.
A signal of readiness.
An invitation to join him.
A clear, echoing orientation point for everyone else navigating the same terrain.

The Tarzan yell carried. It pierced confusion. It announced commitment. And it did so without the pretense that the jungle itself would change overnight.

Technological progress needs fewer blind swings and more purposeful calls—clear signals of where we are, what we know, what we still don’t, and how we intend to move forward. If we can learn to communicate that way—with disciplined resonance rather than hype or secrecy—we stand a better chance of building the village every innovation needs.

It’s a jungle out there, but it can be negotiated. So, here’s to fewer tree-crashes, fewer days in stealth, and fewer seasons of slogans instead of progress.

Unlike George, Tarzan doesn’t swing because he hopes the jungle will rearrange itself around him. He swings because he’s charted the branches. So, here’s to learning to call out with the clarity and courage of Tarzan—so that when we swing, we swing together, eyes open, and with a better sense of where the next tree truly stands — and how to journey there together. READ MORE