When you saw 'bio-based lubricants' you thought it was just a way to appeal to that girl wearing a Greenpeace shirt at the bar around 2AM, right? Not so, perv. Aside from being non-petroleum based, bio lubricants are good. Maybe too good, as this article cum PR piece for WISE Solutions notes. Namely, they can cause machines to over-perform. But that's a good problem to have. Sure, the article coos a little too affectionately about these lubricants to be on the level but the idea merits some consideration. I like the bio-based idea but it hasn't worked well so far. Despite decades of insistence that plant-based products would free us from Big Oil, it's only made things more expensive across the board - namely because oil companies have no incentive to bring prices down when biofuel subsidies match the price of oil. If anything, economically high oil prices are better in a subsidized economy because at least high oil prices lead to corporate taxes. If oil prices were low and we had to subsidize biofuels we would be getting the same pollution and spending more for it. I am aware that any sign of resentment over the sketchy political motivations about biofuels will get me labelled a 'global warming denier' by fundamentalists but I have to mention that the entire time Al Gore was cooing about ethanol (1986 until 2005 when an evil Republican signed mandatory ethanol usage into law and therefore it became obvious ethanol was wrong) I smelled a rat, namely because the subsidies would kill us - and they do, to the tune of $11 billion this year in non-recoverable money. If you don't like money for the military you sure as heck shouldn't like money for government mandates on an energy product everyone knows does not help global warming. Put in context, a top of the line solar system, even at $25,000, could have been installed on 440,000 homes for that money free of charge - and in use for 10 years. And that's just one year. So $11B on biofuel subsidies and mandatory pricing doesn't look great when compared to other ways that money could have been spent to help the environment. Thus, unless these bio-lubricants are made of algae or wheat grass or something that doesn't take a lot of old fashioned fossil fuels to grow and process, they will be a tough sell, at least for the near future.