dangerousmeta!, the original new mexican miscellany, offering eclectic linkage since 1999.

FTA:

“Many of these techies are being recruited by the same Silicon Valley venture firms that were behind successive generations of tech companies, from PC-makers to software companies to two waves of internet firms. Along with Foundation Capital, several of the leading venture firms, including Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, are now betting big on green.”

Harper’s - “The bubble machine often starts with a new invention or discovery. The Mosaic graphical Web browser, released in 1993, began to transform the Internet into a set of linked pages. Suddenly websites were easy to create and even easier to consume. Industry lobbyists stepped in, pushing for deregulation and special tax incentives. By 1995, the Internet had been thrown open to the profiteers; four years later a sales-tax moratorium was issued, opening the floodgates for e-commerce. Such legislation does not cause a bubble, but no bubble has ever occurred in its absence.”

“There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded. Wired magazine, returning to its roots in boosterism, put ethanol on the cover of its October 2007 issue, advising its readers to forget oil; NBC had a “Green Week” in November 2007, with themed shows beating away at an ecological message and Al Gore making a guest appearance on the sitcom 30 Rock. Improbably, Gore threatens to become the poster boy for the new new new economy: he has joined the legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which assisted at the births of Amazon.com and Google, to oversee the “climate change solutions group,” thus providing a massive dose of Nobel Prize–winning credibility that will be most useful when its first alternative-energy investments are taken public before a credulous mob. Other ventures—Lazard Capital Markets, Generation Investment Management, Nth Power, EnerTech Capital, and Battery Ventures—are funding an array of startups working on improvements to solar cells, to biofuels production, to batteries, to “energy management” software, and so on.”

::GRINS::