The alternative fuels industry has been—to state the matter quite bluntly—without a journal of record to provide unbiased reporting and informed commentary. It has also been without a reliable source of competitive analysis and objective assessment of new and emerging technologies or of the companies representing them. Juice aims to provide all of these badly needed perspectives. Sober Assessment - Not Hot Tips While Juice affords the reader an invaluable source of information for investors in alternative fuels and related new energy technologies, it is not an investment service per se—not a guide to undervalued stocks in the energy sector, nor a purveyor of supposedly inside knowledge on the fates of individual companies. We make no recommendations on investment, and certainly no promises of windfall profits for our readers. In fact we warn that in almost any area of emerging technology the vast majority of technology startups are going to fail, taking their investors down with them, while only a favored few will become the industrial giants of a new era. Alternative fuels promises to follow the traditional pattern. What we’re concerned with and what we’ll be investigating is the strength of the explicit or implicit business plans of companies we deem worthy of scrutiny and the real potential of various new and rediscovered technologies for fuel production from unconventional sources. In addition, we’ll offer our subjective but informed judgments on the import of trends and development within the alternative fuel industry and on events in the larger economy and in international relations with an impact on alternative fuels. We’ll also look as far a field as social trends and generational shifts for these too will shape the energy regimes of the future. Be forewarned, this journal is not an exercise in industry cheerleading. Sure, we believe that alternative fuels should and shall play a much larger role in industrial societies in the years to come, but we aim to identify what works rather than uncritically endorsing every alternative fuels initiative that surfaces in the news. We hope you’ll find Juice both informative and thought provoking. And we hope that it offers a clear window on one of the defining industries of the twenty-first century.