Quick Quiz on Clean Energy Investors' Mentality

Here’s a quick question for anyone aspiring to understand clean energy investors’ mentality.  Does capital formation usually favor:

a) certainty and confidence, or

b) the complete lack of clarity we find in Congress regarding an energy bill, a carbon tax, loan guarantees, and cash grants?   

If you picked “a,” you have what it takes to be a Wall Street wizard.

People write me constantly, expressing their bewilderment in investors’ lack of appetite for putting hard-earned cash into entrepreneurial efforts in the renewables space.  But given the impasse on energy policy in Washington and in most of our 50 states, is it really that surprising?

What’s the matter with simply making a decision to join the rest of the world and coming together with a decision to support clean energy?  What exactly is the worst that can happen if we put a tax on pollution and levelize the playing field for alternative energy?  Millions of new jobs?  A cleaner environment?  An end to the bleeding of $1 billion per day that we’re borrowing to buy oil from our enemies? 

Something to think about.