George Gilder on Green Jobs

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/11/george-gilder-on-green-jobs

George Gilder, writing in the Wall Street Journal about "California's Destructive Green Jobs Lobby":

Led by Al Gore's investment affiliate, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, the campaign to save AB 32 raised $31 million—more than three times the $10 million that the oil companies raised for repeal. Pouring in millions were such promethean venturers as John Doerr and Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins, Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin of Google, and the legendary Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove of Intel. The campaign even managed to shake down a contribution from the state's public utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, and gained the backing of the GOP's eBay billionaire gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman.

What is wrong with California's plutocratic geniuses? They are simply out of their depth in a field they do not understand. Solar panels are not digital. They may be made of silicon but they benefit from no magic of miniaturization like the Moore's Law multiplication of transistors on microchips. There is no reasonable way to change the wavelengths of sunlight to fit in drastically smaller photo receptors. Biofuels are even less promising. Even if all Americans stopped eating (saving about 100 thermal watts per capita on average) and devoted all of our current farmland to biofuels, the output could not fill much more than 2% of our energy needs.

I actually think Mr. Gilder has it wrong that these spenders "do not understand" the field in which they are investing. I think, rather, that they understand it so well that they realize that the economics of this technology don't work with government mandates and subsidies, which is why they are spending political money to salvage their investment money. If the technology was so promising as to make the products attractive on their own without the government mandates, the backers of the technology wouldn't need to spend the money on the political side.

by Ira Stoll  |  Nov 16, 2010 at 11:14 am Related Topics:  Energy, Google, Politics receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list