John Doerr: Not nearly enough money going to green tech

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9917408-54.html?tag=newsmap

April 12, 2008 9:07 AM PDT

John Doerr: Not nearly enough money going to green tech

Posted by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Famed venture capitalist John Doerr is conflicted. He says pace of innovation in green technologies, breathtaking in the past five years, is far from fast enough to address the scale of the world's energy problems.

Doerr was the keynote speaker at the MIT Energy Conference here Saturday. He alternated between expressing wonder at the progress in addressing global warming and discouragement at the overall state of affairs.

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Thousands of people have seen a video of a talk Doerr gave at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference last year, in which he broke down crying, telling the story of how, after seeing the movie Inconvenient Truth, his teenage daughter angrily told him to fix the global-warming problem because his generation caused it.

Two years ago, Kleiner Perkins announced the creation of its first green-tech investment fund, and Doerr has become a high-profile investor and policy advocate in the field.

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[ladjf]

1. Wind power generation is already financially competitive with

the conventional generation systems in many locales. Solar is not there yet but will soon be.

Some types of geothermal heating and cooling are competitive.

Despite the colossal efforts by the fossil fuel and nuclear interests to squelch alternate energy initiatives, alternatives WILL be used en mass withing a short time. (less than 20 years).

But, the huge "elephant in the room" with regard to alternate energy sources is that if only 15 or 20% of the demand for oil is replace by wind, solar, geothermal and tidal, the prices of oil will tumble to levels that would be affordable. The monopoly would have been broken for ever. The environment would profit as well as the quality of life for all.

Note: You will likely see rebuttals to my arguments complete will phony numbers and insults. These will be made by people who have clearly defined reasons for their opposition to alternate energy and those reason do not include taking care of the people's best interests.