I am back from San Francisco, my favorite place, where the buzzword that comes after Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is Clean Tech.
There are two possible bogeymen that require investment in energy: expensive oil and global warming. The probable solution to the former is to justify dirty tech, like coal, and the probable solution to the latter is reduction in consumption, which goes against capitalism and, therefore, Venture Capitalism.
In the, ever optimistic, Silicon Valley, Clean Tech Capitalism is being offered as a potential panacea for both situations to combat both environmental and oil supply and demand issues.
Both expensive oil and global warming could in theory be solved by clean tech innovation, but that would require absolutely massive advances in things like portable solar technology to make energy simultaneously cleaner and cheaper than fossil fuels, very quickly. This is less likely than smaller advances in things like digging for coal.
This weakness in the current Clean Tech logic allows for Democrat’s energy stance to be leveraged for different ends by the Republican’s (justifying offshore drilling to combat peak oil, for example). Mark Thoma points out a piece by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenbergers which argues that the Democrats “must break once and for all from green orthodoxy”.