CleanTech Investors To Get an Earful on Energy and Sustainability

I’ve been thinking about my upcoming talk at the monthly meeting of the Santa Barbara Savvy Investors, and I’ve decided to make this multi-varied, taking on a great number of different issues associated with our civilization’s use of energy.  At a minimum, I’ll walk my audience through the most important big issues, which I would summarize as follows:

Our expanding population sports a growing hunger for energy, which, because it’s fed by fossil fuels, is causing a number of different and extremely daunting problems.  In particular, our scientists tell us that we’re in the process of ruining our planet from the perspective of its ability to support most forms of life.  Yet, the concept of humankind’s dealing effectively with a challenge of this scale remains dubious at best.  Homo sapiens didn’t evolve as a species that comes together and decides to make sweeping changes.  And the situation here in the U.S. is plagued by something even thornier: the fossil fuel industry has a stranglehold on our decision-making.  Note that, after leading the world in the development of IT and communications in the 20th Century, America is committed to doing essentially nothing in terms of “new energy,” an industry that is soon to dominate the modern world.  Not only are we not leading, we’re not even following very well; in fact, we’re trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Does this bode well?  Nope.  Not for American competitiveness in the 21st Century, nor for the quality of life facing our civilization.  But can we architect a soft landing?  I believe so.  It’s a function of communicating the fundamental truth in the paragraph above to as many people as possible.

Please — “tell your friends,” as they say.