conspiracy nuts have been screaming all sorts of stuff from the rooftops for years.
if i say 'twenty' every time, eventually i'll correctly predict the outcome of a d20. this doesn't make me good at doing so, nor does it mean that you should have listened.
> Doesnt this take away from the real issue of fossil fuels? Pollution, increased CO2 and climate changes.
No. Any CO2 released when these fuels are burned has to come from the algae. The algae gets it from the air. So CO2 is cycled, but not added to the atmosphere.
the solution is probably a moving-knife procedure[1]:
have a list of rewardable issues. grow the reward for each issue with time. once the reward makes the time spent on the project worthwhile, people will be incentivized to commit. they won't let the reward grow too high, for fear that someone else will take it.
you could let coders freeze the reward for some amount of time, and get exclusive rights to claim that reward, until the time expires.