Lately, the media has been lavishing attention on companies that may be able to get us out of that wretched mess in the Gulf of Mexico. Kevin Costner has gotten more airtime than he has since Dances With Wolves as he pushes his Ocean Therapy device that separates oil from water. Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the famed ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, is also talking up oil-water separators, and he serves on the advisory board of a company called Ecosphere Technologies, which manufactures such devices.

Hey, it’s wonderful that private enterprise is on the march in this crisis. But there’s a hard-eyed bunch of people out there who aren’t at all charmed by fancy-shmancy gizmos and celebrity endorsements. In recent days I’ve heard from a couple of prominent micro-cap short-sellers—traders who bet on stocks declining—that oil-spill cleanup stocks are on their radar screen.

They’re wagering that shares of Ecosphere, traded on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board, are destined to decline. They’re also targeting other small publicly held companies that have technologies or products that stand to benefit from the oil spill, among them Enviro Voraxial Technology, TIE Technologies, Planet Resource Recovery, and PureSafe Water Systems.

These companies, like Ecosphere, all have a trait that makes them red meat in the eyes of short-sellers, who make money by selling borrowed stock. They all are penny stocks, often trading well under a dollar, and all except TIE Technologies, which just started trading, have had significant price run-ups. For instance, Ecosphere, now trading at about $1.50 or so, was only about 50 cents a year ago.

This could be an earthquake ready to erupt, particularly if the shorts start making a public case against these companies. Whenever short-sellers target companies that promise some benefit to society—whether it is a cure for prostate cancer (the perennial short favorite Dendreon Corp.) or law-enforcement devices (TASER International) or construction of armored vehicles for Iraq (Force Protection)—shareholders and anti-short fanatics rise up in righteous anger. And so we have, yet again, the question that surfaces in such situations: Is it wrong, perhaps even unpatriotic, to short sell the stocks of companies that promise to help society?

The shorts have been keeping a low profile, so we don’t have the kind of furor that I discussed last week involving Barry Minkow’s Fraud Discovery Institute. But the shorts’ interest in these companies is not exactly a secret, and some skeptical grumbling on the Internet is beginning to emerge. So I’m sure that screams of horror are soon to be heard.

Short haters maintain that micro-cap stocks can be fatally damaged by short selling of micro-cap stocks. It’s certainly true that “bear raids” can drive down the price of a stock and make it hard to raise capital. But I’ve yet to see a sound company that has been hurt by shorting. Probably the best example of what I’m talking about is Dendreon, which has a promising prostate cancer drug under development. This stock was trading for as little as $3, and even a bit less, in early 2009.

Then, suddenly, Dendreon went crazy. Early in April 2009, the shares climbed 29 percent in one day on news of favorable test results. Some reports, such as this one, were skeptical that the bad news would blow up in Dendreon’s face. But guess what? The shares just kept climbing as the good news about its drug overwhelmed the market, and now it trades at about $35. The shares have been as high as $50.

The shorts were creamed—not by an SEC investigation or dirty tricks, but by the company living up to its investors’ expectations. Force Protection, on the other hand, has not been so lucky. That company was the subject of a particularly vociferous Internet campaign questioning the patriotism of shorts in the stock, but so far the company has been a disappointment to investors. Its shares have been laggards for much of the past year. As one financial blogger recently put it, pointing to the company’s sales numbers, “the force is no longer with Force Protection.”

At the end of the day, it will be the same story with all those oil-spill-cleanup stocks. Balance sheets and income statements, not wishful thinking or flag-waving, will rule the day. So far the jury is out. They’ve been generating plenty of favorable news, such as the announcement by Ecosphere the other day that it has filed a new patent “based on its patented Ozonix technology to help BP and other energy-exploration companies recover oil during a deepwater spill.”

Ozonix doesn’t rely on chemicals, so it has received an understandably sizable amount of media attention. At a news conference a few weeks ago, the company said that “reporters and film crews from local ABC and NBC affiliates, as well a crew from PBS, attended the event.” But the company’s most recent quarterly financial statement showed a significant loss.

That could change pretty dramatically if Ecosphere and the other oil-cleanup stocks are able to cash in on their products as quickly as their fans expect. As the various technologies are tested, while most Americans pray for success, the shorts will be wagering that these companies fail. If they’re right, they’ll get rich. If they’re wrong, they’ll lose a hunk of change.

Is that unpatriotic? Well, look at the flip side: Is it patriotic to sell shares in oil-cleanup technology that doesn’t work? And let’s say that a particular technology works. What’s so doggone patriotic about making a buck betting that it will?