I think you may have accidentally read a frequently-expressed idea into my message, that "science is worthless when it is not practical", that I did not actually say, nor do I believe. The point of the article is I believe more accurately phrased as: If we actually want to solve our energy problems, then we should expect to need to invest in engineering, not just science. The discussion was framed not as an abstract consideration of the virtues of science, but, given that we have important problems that need solving, are we approaching the solution in the best manner? Or, by conflating "science" and "engineering", are we accidentally satisfying ourselves that we are making progress when in fact we are investing too much in science and not enough in engineering, a mistake we might not make if we did not freely conflate the two so frequently?

In the specific context of solving real world problems, this question has meaning, and it's not the generic "useless science is useless" argument, it's actually grounded in very real considerations.

This is part of the reason I posted in the first place, as people are getting drawn to the strange attractor of the generic science vs. engineering question I felt people were missing out on the more interesting and more subtle question brought up by the article itself. (And personally I think "science vs. engineering" is just a boring and irrelevant definition debate when it comes down to it, everybody citing their personal definitions at each other and arguing which definition is "real" as if that actually matters. This article raises an actually interesting question with teeth in it, and works perfectly well with rather standard definitions of the two terms.)