Vinod Khosla and State of Green Tech

Interesting article on Vinod Khosla; his and an environmentalist's views on climate change and green tech and state of green tech in silicon valley, excerpt below:

Mr Khosla has a different plan to save the planet. He is investing over $1 billion of his clients’ money in “black swans”—ideas with the potential for sudden jumps in technology that promise huge environmental benefits, easy scalability and rapid payback. The catch? Mr Khosla expects nine out of ten of his investments to fail.

...This sort of talk does not exactly endear Mr Khosla to environmentalists. “The solution to our energy problems is almost the exact opposite of what Khosla says,” declares Joseph Romm, who is the editor of Climate Progress, an influential climate blog, and a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a think-tank. “Technology breakthroughs are unlikely to be the answer. Accelerated deployment of existing technologies will get you down the cost curve much more rapidly than a breakthrough.”

But Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, whose IPO kicked off the internet boom, thinks Silicon Valley investors will prefer to stick to information technology. He has even promised that his latest venture-capital fund will avoid “clean, green, energy and electric cars”. He argues that clean-tech is a very different field. “Moving from IT ventures to green technologies is nearly impossible, except for rare and extraordinary individuals like Vinod,” he says. “He has put years into becoming a master of the field, but it’s not the entire Valley deciding to move into clean-tech.” Mr Khosla’s mentor at Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr, has expressed concern over his own company’s green investments and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a partner at the Founders Fund, has said that clean-tech companies “for a variety of reasons don’t work”.