To Blog or To Email, Climate Change makes the jump

I have a group of friends that are passionate about solving global warming.  We e-mail around articles, observations and opinions.  These friends are mostly tech-entrepreneurs, economists and wall-street-types, so the conversation is usually very action-oriented… as opposed to political or academic policy/theory.   But this week something changed.  Now that the election is over, even my political-policy-wonk friends started talking about climate change. 
 
My theory is that now that the election is over, global climate change will start to get the attention it deserves.   Looks like the new administration agrees, because they seem poised to appoint a “Climate Czar”   
 
Global climate change is as big as a problem as problems get. To solve it, we are going to need innovation from everywhere.  Historically, I have trumpeted the innovation form industry, scientist and entrepreneurs.    (Full disclosure am a huge fans of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction).  However, climate change demands innovation in public policy (translation: governments).  Let’s hope that now that the election is over, we can move the conversation about climate change off the listserve and onto the web. 
 
I predict Global Climate change will get solved:
    By technology,
        Invented by scientists,
            Commercialized by entrepreneurs,
                Spurred on by investors,
                    and supported by public policy.
 
Let’s hope a more public discussion adds fuel the fire, (Wow, that is a bad use of metaphor).

Comments

[Jed Katz]

My guess is that this will be a constant theme from the administration, thus accelerating innovation and investment. And winning ideas will be celebrated on a national scale. This is indeed an entrepreneur's dream.

[Jeff]

While innovations in the fields of SaaS, Data and social services certainly benefit cleantech, I think the real fire will come from nanotech, silicon-solar, bio-tech, silicon-MEMs, sensors, and who knows what else. Energy is currently a 6 Trillion Dollar market! If Craig Newmark can take the 6 billion dollar newspaper classified industry and turn it into a nice little 100 million dollar industry, imagine if someone like Craig turns energy into a 100 billion dollar industry. Everyone on earth for the next 10 generations would be impacted. Impossible, you say? My grandfather thought it would be impossible to SEE an airplane in his lifetime.

[Victor]

I think the timeline of your climate change solution is dead on.

I was reading NY Magazine the other day, talking about how Obama will make the transition, and there was a line in there like, "The first thing he will do is shift the economy entirely to focus on green energy."

My first thought- damn, this is an entrepreneur's dream. I see no social-networking or even business-networking tool specifically tailored to assist communication between all the new forms of cleantech businesses in this nascent economy. Maybe I just haven't seen it, but there are these huge gaping holes that are just waiting to be filled by the first entrepreneurs that win the intellectual race to think of them.