Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [6]
Perhaps an environmentalist crying over the state of the world would not exactly count as hot news. But John Doerr started his career at Intel and holds master’s degrees in electrical engineering and business, not ecology or political science. He and the venture capital firm he worked for, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, were the very people who refused to see limits to growth. He was not the guy one expects to cry about the earth on the tech elite’s biggest stage. It was a sign that a new type of movement to save the world was on. In response to the threat of global warming and the opportunity to take down the Jurassic energy industry, the green banner was pulled from the musty closet of a previous generation’s lexicon and unfurled on a new streamlined boat. Green tech was born.
The prime actors in the green tech movement aren’t activists. Few would advocate protests as a means to solving problems. Instead, their mantra is creative destruction, and their targets are the wildcatters, utilities, power plant makers, and infrastructure maintainers that keep the country’s grid humming and its cars filled with fuel.
Drawing on their experience watching the price of computing power inexorably fall along the path termed Moore’s Law, after the Intel chief who called out the trend, the green technologists are certainly something new on the scene. Their faith that the methods of technology can solve energy problems may be a virtue, or their optimism may be, in Vaclav Smil’s evocative language, “Moore’s Curse.”3 For now, we are able to say for certain that Silicon Valley, with its chapbook of quirks, entered the energy fray in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2008 and 2009 venture capital firms doled out $12.5 billion to green-tech startups,4 and they’ve already exerted a powerful influence on the nation’s leaders’ thinking about energy and environmental issues. In fact, John Doerr is now a special economic adviser to the Obama administration.5 Furthermore, in early 2010 Bill Gates gave his own TED talk, calling for low-carbon “energy miracles.”6
The technological base the green technologists are working from has surprisingly deep roots. The basics of the grid-and-oil energy system rounded into place a little more than a century ago. As we’ll see, wave motors, wind turbines, solar power plants, electric cars, and a host of other “alternative” energy ideas had already seen the light of day long before the average American had a single light bulb to fend off the darkness. If we don’t know these histories, it’s because the fossil-fueled economy of the twentieth century had a tendency to pave over alternatives to itself, leaving only curious hints of worlds that might have been.
But Doerr and his venture capital cohorts, such as Ira Ehrenpreis of Technology Partners and Erik Straser of Mohr Davidow Ventures, don’t see the developments of the last century as a bad thing. The globalization of markets, the expansions of economies, the triumph of capitalism over religious, ethnic, and societal resistance—these are what made the material world we all inhabit. Like most techno-optimists, they believe it’s a much better world than that of 1957 or 1907 or 1807. “I’m a raging capitalist. My job is to make a lot of money,” Doerr told a reporter in 2009. “I’m a technology junkie. I’m also an American. I’m a very lucky kid from St. Louis.”7
Doerr doesn’t want to unmake the industrial world—with all its inequities and problems; rather, he wants to remake it, to sustain it, to grow it. And to make money from it: “Energy is a six trillion dollar business worldwide. It is the mother of all markets,” Doerr told the TED crowd. “Remember that Internet? I’ll tell you what: Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”
Doerr’s talk is listed on the TED website under the heading, “John Doerr Sees Salvation and Profit in Greentech.” To the intellectual environmentalists of the 1960s and ’70s, however, Doerr’s notions of