cleantech

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pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, cleantech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

People got busy: entrepreneurs started thousands of cleantech companies, and investors poured more than $50 billion into them. So began the quest to cleanse the world. It didn’t work. Instead of a healthier planet, we got a massive cleantech bubble. Solyndra is the most famous green ghost, but most cleantech companies met similarly disastrous ends—more than 40 solar manufacturers went out of business or filed for bankruptcy in 2012 alone. The leading index of alternative energy companies shows the bubble’s dramatic deflation: Why did cleantech fail? Conservatives think they already know the answer: as soon as green energy became a priority for the government, it was poisoned.

But the striking thing about the cleantech bubble was that people were starting companies with zero good answers—and that meant hoping for a miracle. It’s hard to know exactly why any particular cleantech company failed, since almost all of them made several serious mistakes. But since any one of those mistakes is enough to doom your company, it’s worth reviewing cleantech’s losing scorecard in more detail. THE ENGINEERING QUESTION A great technology company should have proprietary technology an order of magnitude better than its nearest substitute. But cleantech companies rarely produced 2x, let alone 10x, improvements.

And compared to the total global power generation capacity of 15,000 gigawatts, your 100 megawatts is just a drop in the ocean. Cleantech entrepreneurs’ thinking about markets was hopelessly confused. They would rhetorically shrink their market in order to seem differentiated, only to turn around and ask to be valued based on huge, supposedly lucrative markets. But you can’t dominate a submarket if it’s fictional, and huge markets are highly competitive, not highly attainable. Most cleantech founders would have been better off opening a new British restaurant in downtown Palo Alto. THE PEOPLE QUESTION Energy problems are engineering problems, so you would expect to find nerds running cleantech companies.


pages: 197 words: 53,831

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cleantech, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft

Unfortunately, good ideas do not always equal good investments. A 2016 report from MIT found that venture capital firms spent over $25bn funding clean energy technology start-ups between 2006 and 2011 and lost over half their money. As a result, it warned, funding had dried up in the cleantech sector. A new dawn for cleantech? Energy investors claim it is different this time. For one thing, renewable energy costs have come down substantially and are now comparable to mainstream energy. Even in 2013, US wind and solar costs were not commercial without subsidies. By 2018, they had more than halved.

The companies in the group’s portfolio include Massachusetts-based Malta, which converts electricity from the grid into heat, stores it in molten salt, then converts it back to electricity and returns it to the grid when needed. Another company, Quidnet Energy, uses wells to store energy as pumped hydro, avoiding the need for mountains or lakes. Cleantech investment highlights some ways in which investing in climate change solutions can be different to traditional investments. Recognising that cleantech can take a long time to develop successfully, the Breakthrough Energy fund has a time horizon of 20 years when it makes an initial investment. This makes it different from other early-stage investors. Normally venture capital or private equity investors expect to get a return on their investment – usually through the sale of the private company or when it lists on the stock market – within 10 years.

Normally venture capital or private equity investors expect to get a return on their investment – usually through the sale of the private company or when it lists on the stock market – within 10 years. Part of BEV’s strategy is to give cleantech companies more time than normal investors would. A typical tech investor in Silicon Valley investing in a new, unproven technology might give the company a little money and a little time, and see how it does. That might be half a million dollars over six months. With cleantech, says Eric Toone at BEV, it needs to be more like $30m over five years. Unproven technology is a huge risk. There will be winners, but there will also be losers, and there is no way of telling for sure at the start.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

23andMe, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator

Kleiner had effectively embraced the opposite of the philosophy at Accel, which believed in recruiting hungry up-and-comers and training them.[47] This change in Kleiner’s culture set the stage for the cleantech fiasco. When Doerr decided to bet the franchise on a challenging sector, nobody was there to check him. Compton and Mackenzie were especially missed: they were openly skeptical of cleantech, regarding it as too capital intensive, too slow to mature, and too hostage to the whims of government regulation. With the benefit of hindsight, Compton even argued that the cleantech error violated the lessons handed down by Tom Perkins himself. Far from going all in on high-stakes bets, Perkins had used small amounts of capital to eliminate the main risks in a venture—the “white-hot risks,” as he called them.

As Lee, Vassallo, and Pao suspected, partnerships that relied on clubby informality were bad for women.[65] John Doerr’s idealism was sincere and mostly admirable. He believed passionately that VC-fueled innovation was a force for good, which made cleantech irresistible. He was right that the Valley’s near exclusion of women represented wasted talent and was socially untenable. By throwing his energy behind cleantech and female advancement, he shoved history forward. A few cleantech investments worked out—Nest’s smart thermostats, for example—and the early failures helped to clear the way for the more successful second wave. Likewise, Doerr’s hiring of women ultimately worked out for the women, even if Kleiner failed to capture the results of their talent: by 2020, four ex-Kleiner women were running their own venture firms, and three were ranked among the top hundred VCs globally.[66] But by embracing change without slogging through the detailed work of implementing it, Doerr almost destroyed his firm.

Green technologies—going green—is bigger than the Internet.”[37] Whatever its existential importance, cleantech was a tough field for venture investors, and Doerr should not have suggested that large markets were the same as profitable ones. Startups working on wind power, biofuels, or solar panels were capital intensive, heightening the risk of losing large sums; their projects took years to mature, depressing annual returns on the few that succeeded. To compensate for the large capital requirements and long time frames, cleantech investors could in theory have invested at lower valuations and demanded additional equity for their money.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

"Robert Solow", Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, cleantech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Available online at http://www.epa.gov/methane/ (accessed 8 October 2012). EPIA (European Photovoltaic Industry Association). 2012. Global Market Outlook for Photovoltaics until 2016. Brussels: European Photovoltaic Industry Association, May. Ernst & Young. 2011. ‘Cleantech Matters: Seizing Transformational Opportunities’. Global Cleantech and Trends Report 2011. Ey.com. Available online at http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Cleantech-matters_FW0009/$FILE/Cleantech-matters_FW0009.pdf (accessed 29 January 2013). Evans, P. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Evans, P. and J. Rauch. 1999. ‘Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross-National Analysis of the Effects of “Weberian” State Structures on Economic Growth’.

E. and L. M. Branscomb. 2003. ‘Valleys of Death and Darwinian Seas: Financing the Invention of Innovation Transition in the United States’. Journal of Technology Transfer 28, nos. 3–4: 227–39. Baker, D. R. 2010. ‘Funding for Clean-Tech Firms Plunges 33% in ’09’. SfGate.com. Available online at http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-07/business/17470394_1_venture-funding-cleantech-group-venture-capitalists (accessed 6 June 2011). Bakewell, S. 2011. ‘Chinese Renewable Companies Slow to Tap $47 Billion Credit’. Bloomberg Business Week, 16 November. Available online at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-16/chinese-renewable-companies-slow-to-tap-47-billion-credit.html (accessed 26 January 2012).

‘G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether’. New York Times, 24 March. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=g.e.&st=cse (accessed 25 July 2012). Korosec, K. 2011. ‘Cleantech Saviour: US Military to Spend $10B Annually by 2030’. Smartplanet.com, 13 October. Available online at http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/cleantech-savior-us-military-tospend-10b-annually-by-2030/9593 (accessed 28 January 2013). Kraemer, K. L., G. Linden and J. Dedrick. 2011. Capturing Value in Global Networks: Apple’s iPad and iPhone’. Personal Computer Industry Center, University of California–Irvine.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, cleantech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But in light of the experience of Germany and Spain, there seems to be little justification for subsidizing the actual physical production of solar panels. Where does all this leave Fremont? The city is still courting clean-tech employers and has exempted clean-tech companies from payroll taxes. Although the closing of Solyndra was a major setback, local growth is still driven by R&D-intensive clean-tech companies, along with new biotech and high-tech firms that have also cropped up in recent years. There are now twenty-five clean-tech firms in Fremont, up from six in 2006. While some of them depend at least in part on federal subsidies, others are operating purely on private venture capital.

But unlike Detroit, Fremont has been able to attract a number of clean-tech companies, some of which have opened in old manufacturing plants. In fact, the old NUMMI factory is now occupied by Tesla Motors, best known for its Roadster, the first serially produced highway-capable electric car available in the United States. For a while the future did not look grim. “You can’t throw a Frisbee in Fremont without hitting another solar company,” Dan Shugar, the chief executive of the solar power company Solaria, told the press in 2010. At the time, Lori Taylor, Fremont’s economic development director, was optimistic that clean-tech companies would eventually become the city’s new growth engine.

Advantage 3: The (Almost) Magical Economics of Knowledge Spillover ECOtality is a company at the forefront of clean transportation and power storage technology, which in 2010 moved its headquarters from Arizona to the Bay Area. It is not the only one. The German company Q-Cells, the Chinese companies Trina Solar, Suntech, and Yingli Green Energy, and the Spanish company FRV have all recently opened shop in the Bay Area. Clean-tech companies are increasingly locating their headquarters and/or their R&D labs in the region. In a recent interview with the CEO of ECOtality, NPR reported that the reason for his move was “to be close to the action.” On some level, this makes intuitive sense. After all, who wants to be away from the action?


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, BRICs, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

The hard work was no longer technical, which had always been the Val ey’s forte; it was amassing large audiences and innovating new advertising models to sustain them. Many people hoped that cleantech could be the new computer, and indeed Barack Obama talked this up in his 2008 Presidential debates as a way to fix the economy. There were plenty of opportunities to change the way we use and generate electricity, and done correctly it could be a huge market. But cleantech represented two things venture capitalists hate: investing in so-cal ed science fair projects where hundreds of mil ions could be spent before you’d even know if you had a product, and having to be dependent on the government.

In one swoop, Margalit is trying to create a new industry and give the old one a new reason to exist. How’s that for profitable patriotism? Other Israelis, like Agassi, are turning to cleantech as the new hope. After al, it plays to Israel’s uniquely endemic strengths. The country is replete with the main ingredients for solar power—sun, sand, and a knack for solving difficult technical problems. Israel has another edge when it comes to cleantech: It’s difficult to find a place much more determined to reduce its dependence on Arab oil. There’s something poetic about Israel creating the next wave of innovation that could erode its enemies’ revenues.

But cleantech represented two things venture capitalists hate: investing in so-cal ed science fair projects where hundreds of mil ions could be spent before you’d even know if you had a product, and having to be dependent on the government. There was inevitably going to be a few decades where the costs of remaking our electrical lives would be prohibitive for most consumers, and hence would have to be subsidized by something like tax incentives. A lot of VCs talked a good game about cleantech, but most of the investments were lower-capital plays that only nibbled at the core problems, like a software system for better routing electricity around large retail chains. A glaring exception was Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal and an immigrant from South Africa. While his fel ow PayPal alums plowed their money back into the Web 2.0 world—funding or starting companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Slide, and Yelp—Musk built a rocket company cal ed SpaceX, a solar panel company cal ed SolarCity, and an electric car company cal ed Tesla.


pages: 197 words: 60,477

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, cleantech, Community Supported Agriculture, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, web application, winner-take-all economy

What this story lacks in pizazz, it makes up in repeatability: There’s nothing mysterious about how Alex Berger broke into Hollywood—he simply understood the value, and difficulty, of becoming good. The Most Desirable Job in Silicon Valley Mike Jackson is a director at the Westly Group, a cleantech venture capital firm on Silicon Valley’s famous Sand Hill Road. To say that Mike has a desirable job is an understatement. “I have a friend who recently had dinner with the dean in charge of a top-tier business school,” he told me. “And at this dinner, the dean said that everyone in their graduating class right now wants to be a cleantech VC.” Mike has experienced this firsthand: He receives dozens of e-mails from business school students asking him about his path.

Chapter Six The Career Capitalists In which I demonstrate the power of career capital in action with two profiles of people who leveraged the craftsman mindset to construct careers they love. Two Career Capitalists Alex Berger is thirty-one: He’s a successful television writer and he loves his work. Mike Jackson is twenty-nine: He’s a cleantech venture capitalist and he also loves his work. This chapter is dedicated to telling their stories, as they both highlight the somewhat messy reality of using the craftsman mindset to generate fantastic livelihoods. Alex and Mike both focused on getting good—not finding their passion—and then used the career capital this generated to acquire the traits that made their careers compelling.

What interests me about Mike is that, like Alex Berger, he didn’t arrive at his outstanding job by following a clear passion. Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities. Unlike Alex, however, Mike started gathering capital before he knew what he wanted to do with it. In fact, he had never given a moment’s thought to cleantech venture capital until a couple weeks before his first interview. How Mike Jackson Became a Venture Capitalist Mike majored in biology and earth systems at Stanford. After earning his bachelor’s degree, Mike elected to stay for a fifth year to earn a master’s. The professor who supervised his master’s was trying to decide whether or not to launch a major research project studying the natural-gas sector in India, so he arranged Mike’s thesis to act as an exploration of the project’s viability.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, cleantech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

See Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, and Devashree Saha, “Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment” (Brookings, 2011), p. 11. See also “Global Cleantech 100,” The Guardian, 2010 (www.guardian.co.uk/ globalcleantech100/cleantech-100-2010-list?CMP=twt_gu); Jonathan Rothwell and Mark Muro, “Where the Cleantech Companies Are,” New Republic: The Avenue, February 23, 2011; Jonathan Rothwell and Mark Muro, “Top of the Class: The Role of Leading Academic Programs in Cleantech Innovation,’’ New Republic: The Avenue, February 24, 2011. 42. Ibid. 43. Applied Sciences NYC, “Investing in Innovation for a Stronger Economy,” September 13, 2011 (http://nycedc.tumblr.com/post/10165992406/check-out-ourinfographic-that-illustrates-how).

The largest 100 metros 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 30 5/20/13 6:48 PM NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY 31 in the United States are home to 78 percent of the jobs in solar energy, 80 percent in wind energy, and 83 percent of the jobs in energy research, engineering, and consulting services. They are also the site of fifty-four of the fifty-eight top-ranked high-impact U.S. clean technology firms on the 2010 Global Cleantech 100 list.41 Three-quarters of clean economy jobs created from 2003 to 2010 are located in large metros. Moreover, the clean economy is innovation intensive and thus plays to metropolitan area strengths.42 The city and the NYCEDC believe that the Applied Sciences initiative is already paying off.

In its first round in 2010, with 111 companies participating, the effort raised more than $90 million dollars and created 500 jobs.45 With the help of city leadership and through private funding, a $5.5 million, 12,000 square-foot Innovation Center has been built to provide incubator space outfitted with the latest technology, where new firms can exchange ideas and grow.46 The district has become a hub for innovation on sustainability. The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy, a U.S. subsidiary of the German research institution, and GreenTown Labs both have a presence in the district and are dedicating a portion of their facilities to incubate clean-tech companies. Second, the city has encouraged a range of flexible housing options that would appeal to a unique class of workers, thinkers, and others that 06-2151-2 ch6.indd 124 5/20/13 6:53 PM THE RISE OF INNOVATION DISTRICTS 125 are drawn to the area. The Boston Redevelopment Authority, for example, is testing market acceptance of micro apartment units that exist in housing developments with shared amenities and public spaces.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Robert Solow", accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cleantech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The sheer scale of the opportunity was very compelling. In its analysis, Kleiner Perkins estimated that the total annual information technology market was $1 trillion a year, while that for energy was $6 trillion. The entry of venture capital into cleantech has gone from the trickle to the veritable flood. Investment in the U.S. cleantech industry went from $286 million in 2001 to $3.7 billion in 2010—a rise of more than ten times. In 2010 cleantech represented 17 percent of total VC investment in the United States.16 “MIT IS DOING ENERGY” Robert Metcalfe is one the legends of the information technology business. He invented the Ethernet, which makes possible the LANs—local area networks—that link computers in offices and homes.

They also provide the mechanism for folding higher-cost renewable energy into the overall power portfolio, although some foresee a reaction to rate shock on the part of consumers owing to the higher costs of renewables.22 CLEANTECH The rising prices for energy, beginning around 2003 and 2004, helped propel accelerated growth of, and support for, renewables in the United States. It also, at least for a time, narrowed the cost gap between renewable and conventional energy. Climate change became a much more explicit part of energy policy. As a result of all these factors, investment in renewables increased dramatically. As venture capital began investing in the sector, renewables gained yet another new name—“cleantech.” And providing confirmation that renewables were moving into the mainstream, investment banks established “clean energy” teams and began to distribute cleantech research.23 But as the Great Recession of 2008 broke, it hit renewables hard.

The administration responded to the financial crisis and ensuing recession with a massive economic stimulus program, a significant part of which was aimed at renewables and cleantech. Other countries rushed to support their own faltering economies through fiscal stimulus—or government spending—and that also included building up their renewable energy sectors. In the United States, the energy stimulus was sometimes described as the largest energy bill ever passed. Renewable energy became a significant theme of the recovery. The promise of green jobs and cleantech jobs was a major component in the promotion of the stimulus package. Even more than Jimmy Carter, Obama focused on transforming America’s energy system.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamonds, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, commoditize, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

In tackling both financial and energy crises simultaneously, the Obama administration is planning everything from a “green bank” to a clean energy development agency to provide more than $100 billion to fund clean-tech research and create jobs in solar cell installation (which takes more hands than running a power plant), to build commuter railways and smart grids, to expand the country’s natural gas infrastructure, and to reinsulate houses and buildings. The United States has at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone that are suitable for solar plants. America’s high-tech and clean-tech communities are now coming together to design green infrastructures for the common man. Shai Agassi’s company Better Place has been designing an electric car infrastructure since well before Obama was elected, while local entrepreneurs and utilities are combining to make a thirty-foot-tall windmill with seven-foot blades the new must-have backyard accessory in as many as fifteen million homes.

Getting on the right path isn’t about bashing Mideast despots but making the most efficient use of the resources we already have. The eclectic experiments under way from Brazil to India in alternative energy, water sharing, and emissions reductions hold the greatest promise for sustainable living, and the new partnerships emerging among clean-tech companies, mayors, and conservation groups are the real story of climate diplomacy today. Diplomats often aspire to save the world—this is your chance to actually do it. All Politics Are Ecological The following headlines are coming to a newspaper near you: “Indonesian Rain Forest Dwindles to Few Million Hectares,” “Nile River Flow Reduced to Silt Sludge,” and “OPEC Pushes Pedal, but Oil Gushers Gone.”

The World Bank’s Clean Development Mechanism, which approves projects after third-party vetting, has given $200 million to Indian companies to upgrade their power plants, while the International Finance Corporation has boosted funding for gas refinery projects that are compliant with its eco-friendly Equator Principles. Progress in climate negotiations actually depends on emerging markets confidently adopting the technologies that will allow them to even bother showing up at summits. Until then, climate conference should be put on ice, and all the money put into clean-tech transfer funds. Were it not for the scientific community housed at major universities, diplomats would be pushing their target dates back for centuries to come. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has global credibility most of all because it has among its members scientists and scholars, not diplomats defending national interests.


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The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, cleantech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Commodity Super-Cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, full employment, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

‘In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, Local Communities Claim that Lithium Operations Have Contaminated Streams Used for Humans, Livestock and Crop Irrigation’, Friends of the Earth, 2013. ‘The World’s Worst Pollution Problems 2016: the toxics beneath our feet’, Green Cross Switzerland and Pure Earth, 2016. Chapter Two: The dark side of green and digital technologies The 5th Annual Cleantech & Technology Metals Summit: Invest in the Cleantech Revolution. ‘World Energy Outlook 2019 Factsheet: Power and renewables’, International Energy Agency, 2019. Tourillon reached this estimate using the Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Refer to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator online.

As rightly put by Louis Maréchal, currently extractives sector policy adviser within the OECD’s Responsible Business Conduct Unit, by transferring the responsibility of production to mining countries we have also relocated the associated societal repercussions: corruption, conflict, governance issues, the black market, human rights violations, and so on. Interview with Louis Maréchal, 2017. Keynote by Gregory Bowes, Chairman of Northern Graphite, 5th Annual Cleantech & Technology Metals Summit: Invest in The Cleantech Revolution, 2016. Interview with Xue Lan, professor of political science at Tsinghua University, 2016. ‘Annual Report Pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 for the Fiscal Year Ended September 29, 2018.’, Apple Inc, 2018. Apple’s 2019 environmental report mentions the presence of metals such as rare earths, cobalt and tungsten in their mobile phones, but omits the conditions under which they are extracted and refined.

See ‘Red China’s Green Crisis’, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2017. These are the key takeaways of the research by Karl Gerald Van den Boogaart from the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology. His work was presented at the Denver SME Critical Minerals Conference in 2014 and quoted by Dudley Kingsnorth at the 5th Annual Cleantech and Technology Metals Summit in Toronto in April 2016. Dudley Kingsnorth, professor at Curtin University, Western Australia. A highly approximate estimation values the production market at $1,800 billion in 2015. Interview with Peter Dent of the Electron Energy Corporation, 2011.


pages: 169 words: 56,250

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

barriers to entry, cleantech, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, fail fast, G4S, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, minimum viable product, Network effects, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, place-making, pre–internet, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, text mining, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Participants in the CU New Venture Challenge didn’t have to attend these discussions, but this provided a platform for those who needed help. The classes were high impact for many students as well as for entrepreneurs in the community who attended these lectures. In recent years, we further tailored the courses to the subject matter of the companies and have introduced separate tracks for information technology, cleantech, music, and social entrepreneurship. Finally, the CU New Venture Challenge created a community pipeline through a mentorship program. Each participating team is offered a mentor with relevant background in the team’s area. Mentors agree to take at least two meetings with their assigned team. This allows great relationships to go forward by choice, but gives unproductive relationships a stop date.

Initially we added about 10 companies a year. With our increased resources, we now plan to add 30 companies a year. We have expanded our program to include a 1 percent of profit model for non-VC backed companies; our geography to include Fort Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs; and our industries to include bio, cleantech, and LOHAS. The power in the Entrepreneurs Foundation model is to connect startup efforts to the community right now, when it is easy. The result of this will be stronger communities, stronger businesses, stronger leaders, and more success at creating an entrepreneurial and empathetic society. That is the kind of place I want to live and work.

In this chapter, we’ll explore some of these weaknesses along with what some of the leaders in the Boulder startup community are doing to address them over the next 20 years. PARALLEL UNIVERSES Although Boulder has an incredible entrepreneurial density, it actually has five startup communities. I’m involved in the tech community, which I often refer to as software/Internet for clarity. The other four are biotech, cleantech, natural foods, and lifestyles of health and sustainability (LOHAS). Let’s focus on the natural-foods startup community. Celestial Seasonings, started in the 1960s, is one of Boulder’s favorite natural foods companies, but did you know that two companies—Alfalfa’s and Wild Oats—which make up about a third of Whole Foods, were started in Boulder?


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Robert Solow", 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cleantech, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, natural language processing, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precautionary principle, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

In fact it's often part of that same parasitic ecosystem.36 Timescales in biotech or materials science are often too long for venture capital funds to realise a return. Creating a minimum viable product is, unlike with software, capital and infrastructure intensive. Cleantech is a good example. In 2006 $1.75 billion was invested in cleantech. By 2011 that amount had boomed to $25 billion.37 But then at least half the money was lost in company failures. Venture capitalists shied away from such investments as they showed that ‘real world’ tech was more difficult and longer than the cycles of software and traditional VC investment. Cleantech was damaged, progress set back years. VC-backed R&D struggles with this kind of physical prototyping, which, unlike websites, comes with enormous startup costs and steep learning curves.

Andrew Ng, the AI pioneer, argues that the complexity of the Chinese language, and its level of investment, have pushed AI natural language processing ahead of the West, while Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, expects China to overtake the US in AI in the near future.17 Whereas the UK is putting at most £150 million towards the development of quantum computing, China has invested $15 billion and rising – its National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences is the largest anywhere in the world. Projects like the Chang’e 4 probe, the world's first to land and explore on the far side of the moon, the 500m Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, and advances in cleantech like batteries and photovoltaics are the fruits of year-on-year spending increases of well over 12 per cent. A single research park in Beijing, Zhongguancun, sprawls over 100 square kilometres and hosts 20,000 companies. The Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that a base is planned for the Moon's south pole, and a mission to land on Jupiter's moon Callisto is also in the works.18 It's hard to see any of this grinding to a halt in the next decades.

., and Uzzi, Brian (2007), ‘The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge’, Science, Vol. 316 No. 5827, pp. 1036–9 Xinhua (2019), ‘China to build scientific research station on Moon's south pole’, Xinhua, accessed 18 January 2021, available at http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-04/24/c_138004666.htm Yueh, Linda (2018), The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, London: Penguin Viking Index ‘0,10’ exhibition 103 ‘0-I’ ideas 31 Aadhaar 265 abstraction 103 AC motor 287, 288 academia 209 Académie des sciences 47 Adam (robot) 235–6 Adams, John 211 Adler, Alfred 188 Adobe 265 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 180, 247, 253, 296, 317 AEG 34 aeroplanes 62–6, 68–70, 71, 219 Aeschylus 3 Africa 267, 279–80, 295 age/ageing 122, 158–60, 193 AGI see artificial general intelligence Agrarian Revolution 252 agricultural production 92–3 AI see artificial intelligence Akcigit, Ufuk 193 Alexander the Great 159 Alexander, Albert 52 Alexandrian Library 4, 295, 304 algorithms 175, 185, 196, 224, 235, 245 aliens 240–1, 306, 308–9, 337 Allison, Jim 58 Alphabet 193, 225, 265, 294, 295 AlphaFold software 225–6, 227, 228–9, 233 AlphaGo software 226–7, 228, 233 AlQuraishi, Mohammed 225, 226, 229 Amazon 84–5, 214, 272 Amazon Prime Air 71 American Revolution 139 amino acids 223, 226 Ampère, André-Marie 74–5 Anaximander 35 ancestors 10–12 ancient Greeks 1–6, 7–8, 291, 303–4 Anderson, Kurt 106 Angkor Wat 43 anthrax 47–8, 51 Anthropocene 14–15 anti-reason 211–12 anti-science 211–12 antibacterials 234 antibiotics 38, 52–3, 124, 125, 217, 315 resistance to 235 Apollo missions 70, 315, 316, 317, 318 Apple 33, 85, 159, 185, 186, 193, 272, 296, 312 Aquinas, Thomas 36 AR see augmented reality archaeology 153–4 Archimedes 1–6, 7–8, 19, 27, 32, 37, 39, 291, 304 architecture 103, 115, 188 ARIA 297 Aristarchus 5 Aristotle 24, 108, 282, 304 Arkwright, Richard 25, 26, 34, 253 Armstrong, Louis 103 ARPA see Advanced Research Projects Agency art 99–104, 107–8, 176–7, 236, 321, 339 Artemis (Moon mission) 71, 218 artificial general intelligence (AGI) 226, 237–8, 249, 250, 310, 313, 330, 341 artificial intelligence (AI) 225–9, 233–41, 246–7, 248, 249–52, 262, 266, 300, 310, 312–13, 323, 329, 330, 331, 338 arts 152, 293 see also specific arts Artsimovich, Lev 147 arXiv 116 Asia 264, 267–8, 273, 275 Asimov, Isaac, Foundation 45 Astor, John Jacob 288 astronomy 30, 231, 232 AT&T 85, 181, 183, 185, 197 Ates, Sina T. 193 Athens 24, 295 Atlantis 154 augmented reality (AR) 241–2, 338 authoritarianism 112–13, 284 autonomous vehicles 71, 72, 219 ‘Axial Age’ 108 Azoulay, Pierre 317–18 Bach, J.S. 236 bacillus 46 Bacon, Francis 25, 259 bacteria 38, 46, 53 Bahcall, Safi 31 Ballets Russes 99–100 Baltimore and Ohio railway 67 Banks, Iain M. 310 Bardeen, John 182 BASF 289 Batchelor, Charles 286 Bates, Paul 226 Bayes, Thomas 289 Beagle (ship) 36 Beethoven, Ludwig van 26 Beijing Genomics Institute 257, 294–5 Bell Labs 180–4, 186–8, 190, 206, 214, 217, 289, 296, 322 Benz, Karl 68, 219, 330 Bergson, Henri 109 Bessemer process 80 Bezos, Jeff 71, 326 Bhattacharya, Jay 201, 202, 321 Biden, Joe 59 Big Bang 117, 174, 181 Big Big Ideas 79–80 big ideas 5, 8, 11, 13–19 adoption 28 and an uncertain future 302–36 and art 99–103 artificial 223–38 and the Big Ideas Famine 13 and bisociation 36 blockers to 17–18 and breakthrough problems 46–73, 77, 86, 98, 222, 250, 301 and the ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 and business formation 95 ceiling 18 conception 37 definition 27–8, 40–1 Enlightenment 132–40, 136–40 era of 109–10 erroneous 176 evidence for 222, 223–54 execution 37 ‘fishing out’ mechanism 152 future of 45, 98, 302–36, 337–43 harmful nature 41–2 how they work 23–45 and the Idea Paradox 178–9, 187, 191, 217, 226, 250, 254, 283–4, 301, 312, 342 and the Kardashev Scale 337–43 long and winding course of 4, 5, 35–8, 136 and the low-hanging fruit paradox 149–54, 167, 178 and luck 38–9 moral 136, 138 nature of 169–72 necessity of 41–3 need for 42–3 normalisation of 171–5, 178 originality of 28 paradox of 143–79 and patents 97 process of 37–8 purchase 37–8 and resources 128 and rights 132–40 and ‘ripeness’ 39 and short-termism 192 slow death of 106–7 slowdown of 98 society's reaction to 216 and specialisation 156, 157–8 today 21–140 tomorrow 141–343 big pharma 31, 60, 185, 217–18, 226 Big Science 118–19 Bill of Rights 137 Bingham, Hiram 153 biology 243–8, 300 synthetic 245–6, 251, 310, 329 BioNTech 218, 298 biotech 195–6, 240, 246, 255–8, 262, 266, 307 bisociation 36 Björk 104 Black, Joseph 26 ‘black swan’ events 307, 310 Bletchley Park 180, 296 Bloom, Nick 91, 92, 93 Boeing 69, 72, 162, 165, 192, 238 Bohr, Niels 104, 118, 159 Boltsmann, Ludwig 188 Boston Consulting Group 204 Botha, P.W. 114 Bowie, David 107 Boyer, Herbert 243 Boyle, Robert 232 Brahe, Tycho 36, 229, 292 brain 166, 246–8, 299–300 collective 299, 300–1 whole brain emulations (‘ems’) 248–9, 341 brain drains 197 brain-to-machine interfaces 247–8 Branson, Richard 71 Brattain, Walter 182 Brazil 266–7, 268, 279 breakthrough organisations 294–9 breakthrough problems 46–73, 77, 86, 98, 222, 234, 250, 301 breakthroughs 2–5, 27–8, 32–7, 41, 129, 152, 156 and expedition novelty 333 hostility to 187 medical 58–60 missing 175 near-misses 160 nuclear power 145 price of 87–98 and short-termism 192 slowdown of 87, 94 society's reaction to 216 and universities 204 see also ‘Eureka’ moments breast cancer 94 Brexit referendum 2016: 208 Brin, Sergey 319, 326 Britain 24, 146, 259, 283, 297 see also United Kingdom British Telecom 196 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 67 Brunelleschi 232 Bruno, Giordano 216 Buddhism 108, 175, 264–5, 340 Buhler, Charlotte 188–9 Buhler, Karl 188–9 ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 bureaucracy 198–87, 280–1 Bush, George W. 211 Bush, Vannevar 168, 314–15, 317 business start-ups 95–6 Cage, John 104 Callard, Agnes 111 Caltech 184 Cambridge University 75, 76, 124, 235–6, 257, 294–6 canals 67 cancer 57–61, 76, 93–4, 131, 234, 245, 318 research 59–61 capital and economic growth 88 gray 192, 196 human 275, 277 capitalism 36, 111–13, 186, 189, 191–8 CAR-Ts see chimeric antigen receptor T-cells carbon dioxide emissions 220–1 Cardwell's Law 283 Carey, Nessa 244 Carnap, Rudolf 189 Carnarvon, Lord 153 cars 289 electric 71 flying 71 Carter, Howard 153 Carter, Jimmy 58 Carthage 3, 43 Cartright, Mary 163 CASP see Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction Cassin, René 135 Catholic Church 206, 230 Cavendish Laboratory 76, 294 Cell (journal) 234 censorship 210–11 Census Bureau (US) 78 Centers for Disease Control 212 Cerf, Vint 253 CERN 118, 233, 239, 252, 296 Chain, Ernst 52, 60, 124 Champollion, Jean-François 155 Chang, Peng Chun 135 change 10–13, 18–19, 24 rapid 30, 32 resistance to 222 slowdown 85 chaos theory 163 Chaplin, Charlie 104 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de 300 Charpentier, Emmanuelle 244, 256 chemistry 49, 56, 104, 117, 118, 124, 149–50, 159, 241, 244 chemotherapy 57 Chicago 10 chicken cholera 46 chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR-Ts) 58, 61 China 15, 25, 71–2, 111, 112, 138, 208, 213, 216, 255–64, 265, 266, 267, 268, 275, 277, 279, 280, 283, 284–5, 312, 313, 314, 319, 328 Han 259, 260 Ming 284, 308, 309 Qing 260 Song 24, 259–60, 306 Tang 259–60 Zhou 259 Christianity 108, 303–4, 340 Church, George 245 cities 270–2, 308–9, 340 civilisation collapse 42–4 decay 187 cleantech 195 climate change 219–21, 284, 313–14, 338 clinical trials 218 cliodynamics 339 coal 23, 24, 26, 80, 220 Cocteau, Jean 101 cognitive complexity, high 332–3 cognitive diversity 281–3 Cognitive Revolution 252 Cohen, Stanley N. 243, 244 collective intelligence 339 collectivism 282 Collison, Patrick 117, 272 colour 75 Coltrane, John 104 Columbian Exchange 177 Columbus 38 comfort zones, stepping outside of 334 communism 111, 133, 134, 173, 217, 284 companies creation 95–6 numbers 96–7 competition 87, 283 complacency 221–2 complexity 161–7, 178, 204, 208, 298, 302, 329 high cognitive 332–3 compliance 205–6 computational power 128–9, 168, 234, 250 computer games 107 computers 166–7, 240, 253 computing 254 see also quantum computing Confucianism 133, 259 Confucius 24, 108, 109, 282 Congressional Budget Office 82 connectivity 272 Conon of Samos 4 consciousness 248, 340 consequences 328–9 consolidation, age of 86 Constantine 303 convergence 174, 311–12 Copernicus 29, 30, 41, 152, 171, 229, 232, 292 copyright 195 corporations 204–5 cosmic background microwave radiation 117, 181 cotton weaving, flying shuttle 24–5 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de 74–5 counterculture 106 Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic 13, 14, 15, 55, 86, 113–14, 193, 202, 208, 212, 218, 251–2, 263, 283–4, 297–8, 309, 318, 327 vaccine 125, 245 Cowen, Tyler 13, 82, 94–5, 221 cowpox 47 creativity 188, 283 and artificial intelligence 236 crisis in 108 decrease 106–8 and universities 203 Crete 43 Crick, Francis 119, 296 CRISPR 243, 244, 251, 255–8, 299 Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) 224–6, 228 Cronin, Lee 242 crop yields 92–3 cultural diversity 281–3 cultural homogenisation 177 cultural rebellion 106–7 Cultural Revolution 114, 305 culture, stuck 106 Cunard 67 Curie, Marie 104, 144, 203, 289–90, 332 Daniels, John T. 62–3 Daoism 259 dark matter/energy/force 338 DARPA see Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Darwin, Charles 34, 35–6, 37–8, 41, 77, 109, 118, 171, 289 Darwin, Erasmus 35 data 233 datasets, large 28 Davy, Sir Humphrey 149, 150 Debussy, Claude 100–1 decision-making, bad 43–4 Declaration of Independence 1776: 137 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 1789: 137 DeepMind 225–9, 296 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 315 democracy 111–12 Deng Xiaoping 261 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) 119, 223–4, 243, 251, 255, 339 DNA sequencing 56 Derrida, Jacques 109 Deutsch, David 126, 203 Diaghilev, Sergei 99–101 Diamond, Jared 42 Digital Age 180 digital technology 241–2, 243 diminishing returns 87, 91, 94, 97, 118, 123, 126, 130–1, 150, 161, 169, 173, 222, 250, 276, 285, 301 Dirac, Paul 159–60 disruption 34, 96, 109, 119, 157 diversity, cultural 281–3 DNA see deoxyribonucleic acid Dorling, Danny 171 Doudna, Jennifer 244, 251, 256 Douglas, Mary 290 Douthat, Ross 14, 106 drag 65 Drake equation 306 Drezner, Daniel 214 drones, delivery 71, 72 Drucker, Peter 189 drugs 55–7, 124, 235 Eroom's Law 55, 57, 61, 92–3, 119, 161, 234, 245, 338 and machine learning 234 research and development 55–7, 61, 92–4, 119, 161, 172–3, 217–18, 234, 245, 315, 338 see also pharmaceutical industry Duchamp, Marcel 103, 171 DuPont 184 Dutch East India Company 34 Dyson, Freeman 120 dystopias 305–8 East India Company 34 Easter Island 42–3 Eastern Europe 138 ecocides 42–3 economic growth 240, 272, 273, 316 endogenous 94 and ideas 88, 89–92, 95 process of 87–8 slowdown 82, 83, 84, 85, 178 economics 87–9, 98, 339, 340 contradictions of 87 Economist, The (magazine) 188 Edelman annual trust barometer 209 Edison, Thomas 183–4, 286–9, 290, 293 education 127, 277, 324–8 Einstein, Albert 11, 29, 74, 77, 104, 109, 117, 119, 124, 159–60, 203, 332 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 231 Eldredge, Niles 30 electric cars 71 electricity 11, 74–7, 81, 286–7, 289 electromagnetic fields 76 electromagnetic waves 75, 76 elements (chemical) 149–50 Elizabeth II 144–5 employment 204–5 Encyclopædia Britannica 97, 128, 155 ‘End of History’ 112 energy 337–8, 341–2 availability 85 use per capita 85 see also nuclear power engineering 243 England 25, 144–5, 309 Englert, François 118 Enlightenment 130, 136–40, 252 see also Industrial Enlightenment; neo-Enlightenment Eno, Brian 295 entrepreneurship, decline 96 epigenetics 164 epigraphy 236–7 epistemic polarisation 210 Epstein, David 334 Eratosthenes 5 Eroom's Law 55, 57, 61, 92–3, 119, 161, 234, 245, 338 ethical issues 256–7 Euclid 3, 304 ‘Eureka’ moments 2–5, 35, 36–7, 129, 163 Europe 95, 247, 258–60, 268, 268, 271, 283, 304, 308 European Space Agency 71 European Union (EU) 206, 216, 262, 266 Evans, Arthur 153 evolutionary theory 30, 35–6 expedition novelty 333 experimental spaces 296–8 Expressionism 104 Facebook 34, 159, 170, 197 Fahrenheit 232 failure, fear of 335 Faraday, Michael 75 FCC see Future Circular Collider FDA see Food and Drug Administration Federal Reserve (US) 82 Feigenbaum, Mitchell 163 fermentation 49 Fermi, Enrico 143, 159, 306 Fermi Paradox 306 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 109 fertility rates 269 Feynman, Richard 77, 166, 332 film 104, 106–7, 108, 115 financialism 191–8, 206–7, 214, 217, 219 Firebird, The (ballet) 99–100 ‘first knowledge economy’ 25–6 First World War 54, 99, 104, 187, 188–9 Fisk, James 182 Fleming, Alexander 38, 52, 60, 332 flight 36, 62–6, 68–70, 71, 335 Flint & Company 64 flooding 220, 284 Florey, Howard 52, 60, 124, 332 Flyer, the 62–4, 66, 72 Foldit software 225 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 55, 60, 93, 212 food supply 81 Ford 34, 253 Ford, Henry 68, 104, 219 Fordism 81 Foucault, Michel 110 Fraenkel, Eduard 124 France 49–51, 54, 64, 67, 95, 279, 309, 332 franchises 31 Franklin, Benjamin 119, 211 Frederick the Great 292 French Revolution 137, 275 Freud, Sigmund 34, 36, 77, 104, 171, 188, 190, 216 frontier 278–9, 283–4, 302, 310–11 Fukuyama, Francis 111–12 fundamentalism 213 Future Circular Collider (FCC) 239 futurology 44 Gagarin, Yuri 70 Galen 303 Galileo 206, 231, 232, 291, 322 Galois, Évariste 159 GDPR see General Data Protection Regulation Gell-Mann, Murray 77 gene editing 243–4, 251, 255–8 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 206 General Electric (GE) 33, 184, 265, 288, 333 General Motors 289 Generation Z 86 genes 223–4 genetic engineering 243–4, 251, 253, 255–8 genetic science 163–4, 202 genius 26 genome, human 119, 202, 244, 255–7, 296, 313 genome sequencing 243–4 germ theory of disease 50–1, 53 Germany 54, 95, 96, 279, 283, 292, 332 Gesamtkunstwerk 99 Gibson, William 241 Glendon, Mary Ann 135 global warming 147 globalisation 177 Go 226–7 Gödel, Kurt 41, 168 Goldman Sachs 197 Goodhart's Law 199 Google 34, 85, 185, 197, 240, 272, 318 20 per cent time 319–20 Google Glass 241 Google Maps 86 Google Scholar 116 Google X 294 Gordon, Robert 13, 83, 94–5 Gouges, Olympe de 137 Gould, Stephen Jay 30 Gove, Michael 208 government 205, 207, 214, 216, 252, 267–8, 297 funding 185–6, 249, 252, 314–19, 321 GPT language prediction 234, 236 Graeber, David 13–14, 111 grants 120, 185–6, 195, 202, 316, 317, 319, 321–3 gravitational waves 117–18, 119 Great Acceleration 309–10 Great Convergence 255–301, 339 Great Disruption 96 Great Enrichment (Great Divergence) 23, 26, 258 Great Exhibition 1851: 293, 309 Great Stagnation Debate 13–14, 16, 17, 45, 72, 82–3, 87, 94–6, 129, 150, 240, 279, 338 Greenland 42 Gropius, Walter 103 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 82, 90, 128, 278, 318 GDP per capita 23, 78, 82 growth cultures 25 growth theory, endogenous 88–9, 94 Gutenberg, Johannes 36 Guzey, Alexey 200, 322 Haber, Fritz 332 Haber-Bosch process 289 Hadid, Zaha 152 Hahn, Otto 144 Hamilton, Margaret 316 Harari, Yuval Noah 114–15, 236 Harris, Robert 307 Harvard Fellows 200 Harvard, John 156 Harvey, William 34, 291–2 Hassabis, Demis 229, 233 Hayek, Friedrich 189 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 36 Heisenberg, Werner 41, 159, 168, 332 heliocentric theory 5, 29, 118, 232, 304 helium 145 Hendrix, Jimi 105 Henry Adams curve 85 Hero of Alexandria 39 Herper, Matthew 55 Hertz, Heinrich 76 Herzl, Theodor 188 Hesse, Herman 307 Hieron II, king of Syracuse 1–2 Higgs, Peter 118 Higgs boson 117–18, 119, 239 Hinduism 133 Hiroshima 144 Hitler, Adolf 138, 188 Hodgkin, Dorothy 124, 332 Hollingsworth, J.


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The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, cleantech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, foreign exchange controls, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, oil shock, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

On August 5, 2009, A123 was awarded its grant from the DOE. The next month the stock made its initial public offering, raising almost $400 million, and by October the company’s market capitalization had climbed to $2.3 billion—trading at $25 per share.29 For a time, A123 looked like the ultimate clean-tech success story. But by the end of 2010, A123 stock had plunged more than 90 percent to about two dollars.30 And things were about to get worse. In early 2012 it announced the recall of $55 million worth of faulty battery packs sold in Fiskers and other vehicles.31 And by the summer of 2012, A123 was headed for bankruptcy.

The Obama administration was lumping GM’s survival together with bin Laden’s demise within its pantheon of achievements. So it clearly meant to sustain its focus on America’s auto sector. On the other hand, if Romney won the presidency, there was little doubt that he would seek to withdraw government support for EV innovation and deployment. Romney embraced the Republican narrative of a bankrupt clean-tech sector. He even called Tesla a “loser”—lumping it together with the failed solar company Solyndra and a struggling, soon to be defunct, Fisker. The businessman candidate was rooting, very publicly, against one of America’s most innovative and promising companies. So for EV enthusiasts all over the world, Mitt Romney’s wistful late-night admission on November 6 that his wife, Ann, “would have been a wonderful first lady” came as an intense relief.

As CNOOC had surveyed the technology landscape in 2008, something called “battery swapping” had caught its fancy. Battery swapping allowed an EV driver to change a used battery for a new battery—like you would change the battery in a flashlight. In the West, battery swapping was almost exclusively the province of the luminary clean-tech startup Better Place, which was founded by former SAP executive Shai Agassi. The history of Better Place, as told by Agassi, is that since the mid-2000s he had been wrestling with the problem of “how do you run a whole country without oil.” Then “on a random visit to Tesla . . . . [he] suddenly found out that the answer comes in separating between car ownership and battery ownership.”14 Agassi’s big idea was that by creating a system where electric vehicles could swap out spent batteries easily, he could surmount many of the cost and range issues inherent to EV technology.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, carbon footprint, cleantech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

One is that cities have regulated the emissions of taxis, requiring hybrids in some cases, for example. There’s nothing comparable for ride-hailing, and the companies and drivers would be likely to oppose it. 40. Barrios et al. (2018). 41. Cleantech Group (2104). This analysis finds that in the United States there is less difference between hotels and Airbnbs than in Europe. 42. Cleantech Group (2014). The 1–3 percent figure accords with Bivens’s claim that only 2 percent of Airbnb guests would not have traveled in its absence (Bivens 2019). 43. Tussyadiah and Pesonen (2016). 44. Farronato and Fradkin (2018, 29–30). 45.

The Logic of Didi and Taxi Drivers’ Labour and Activism in the On-Demand Economy.” New Media & Society 20 (8): 2691–2711. Cherry, Miriam A. 2016. “Beyond Misclassification: The Digital Transformation of Work.” Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal 37 (3): 577–602. Cleantech Group. 2014. “Environmental Impact of Homesharing: Phase 1 Report.” San Francisco: Cleantech Group. Clewlow, Regina R., and Gouri Shankar Mishra. 2017. “Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States.” UCD-ITS-RR-17–07. Davis, CA: UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis/pubs/download_pdf.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, cleantech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, global supply chain, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Musk helped come up with the idea for SolarCity and serves as its chairman, while his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive run the company. SolarCity has managed to undercut dozens of utilities and become a large utility in its own right. During a time in which clean-tech businesses have gone bankrupt with alarming regularity, Musk has built two of the most successful clean-tech companies in the world. The Musk Co. empire of factories, tens of thousands of workers, and industrial might has incumbents on the run and has turned Musk into one of the richest men in the world, with a net worth around $10 billion. The visit to Musk Land started to make a few things clear about how Musk had pulled all this off.

It’s just that there was this Elon Musk guy hanging around who seemed to have figured something out that everyone else had missed. “We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech companies for about a decade,” said Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist at Founders Fund. “On the macro level, we were right because clean tech as a sector was quite bad. But on the micro level, it looks like Elon has the two most successful clean-tech companies in the U.S. We would rather explain his success as being a fluke. There’s the whole Iron Man thing in which he’s presented as a cartoonish businessman—this very unusual animal at the zoo.

(Politicians from Nevada, Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona threw themselves at Musk over the battery factory, with Nevada ultimately winning the business by offering Tesla $1.4 billion in incentives. This event confirmed not only Musk’s soaring celebrity but also his unmatched ability to raise funds.) SolarCity has created thousands of white- and blue-collar clean-tech jobs, and it will create manufacturing jobs at the solar panel factory that’s being built in Buffalo, New York. All together, Musk Co. employed about fifteen thousand people at the end of 2014. Far from stopping there, the plan for Musk Co. calls for tens of thousands of more jobs to be created on the back of ever more ambitious products.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cleantech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, Negawatt, off grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, wikimedia commons

Stuck with a product that cost $6.29 per watt to manufacture but only earned $3.42 per watt in the marketplace, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in 2011, leaving taxpayers on the hook to cover a half-billion dollars of debt.34 In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney assailed President Obama’s bet on Solyndra as “a symbol of gross waste.”35 Over the next two years, both Twin Creeks Technologies and Nanosolar also ran out of money, as did nearly every other American solar start-up. Bruised venture capitalists slashed their cleantech portfolios, and solar became a dirty word in Silicon Valley. As for my father, he left solar behind to rejoin the semiconductor industry, where innovation was alive and well. External shocks like falling silicon prices weren’t the only reasons that the solar start-up bubble burst. As I’ve written with my colleagues Ben Gaddy and Frank O’Sullivan, investor expectations for these companies were likely unrealistic from the beginning.

Tim Worstall, “Solyndra: Yes, It Was Possible to See This Failure Coming,” Forbes, September 17, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/09/17/solyndra-yes-it-was-possible-to-see-this-failure-coming. 35.  Ashley Parker, “Romney Campaigns at Failed Solyndra Factory,” The New York Times, May 21, 2012, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/romney-to-campaign-at-failed-solyndra-factory. 36.  Benjamin Gaddy, Varun Sivaram, and Francis O’Sullivan, “Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Clean Energy Innovation,” July 2016, https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MITEI-WP-2016-06.pdf. 37.  Kevin Desmond, Innovators in Battery Technology Profiles of 95 Influential Electrochemists (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2016). 38.  Martin A. Green, “Silicon Solar Cells: The Ultimate Photovoltaic Solution?”

Kammen and Gregory F. Netmet, “The Incredible Shrinking Energy R&D Budget,” The Access Almanac, Spring 2007, 38-40, http://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/07/Access-30-06-Almanac-R-D-Budget.pdf. 10.  Benjamin Gaddy, Varun Sivaram, Timothy Jones, and Libby Wayman, “Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Energy Innovation,” Energy Policy 102 (2017): 385–395, doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2016.12.035. 11.  Jeff Brady, “After Solyndra Loss, U.S. Energy Loan Program Turning a Profit,” NPR, November 13, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363572151/after-solyndra-loss-u-s-energy-loan-program-turning-a-profit. 12.  


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

"Robert Solow", access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cleantech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, working-age population, zero-sum game

The Singaporean government is very aware of the need to build on the economy’s spectacular success by taking its innovative and creative sectors “to the next level”. Committed to research and development Singapore has a range of research centres, such as A*Star’s Fusionopolis and Biopolis, the National Research Foundation (NRF) Create (Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise), the CleanTech Park, the Tuas Biomedical Park, and Singapore Science Park. Government data points out that these are “home to over 1,000 research collaborations with leading players such as Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, BASF, Mitsui Chemicals and Nitto Denko”.33 Multinational corporations like Procter & Gamble and Danone have also established knowledge-intensive regional R&D centres in Singapore to develop Asia-specific products.

article=1021&context=confpapers INDEX Accenture Fintech Innovation Lab ref1 accommodation ref1, ref2, ref3 cheap ref1, ref2, ref3 cramped ref1 displacement of ref1 proximity to amenities ref1 Advanced Card Systems ref1 advertising/marketing ref1, ref2 campaigns ref1 digital ref1 investment in ref1 online ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 role of creativity in ref1 Aerob ref1 AirWatch ref1 Alibaba ref1, ref2 floated on NYSE ref1 Allegra Strategies ref1 Allford, Simon ref1 Allford Hall Monaghan Morris ref1 Amazon.com, Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3 Apple, Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3 development kits ref1 facilities of ref1 product lines of ref1 Argentina Buenos Aires share of GDP ref1 Association of London Councils ref1 AT&T Inc. ref1 Australia ref1 Sydney ref1 Austria Vienna share of GDP ref1 Bangladesh economy of ref1 Dhaka ref1 Bank of England investment guidelines ref1 BASF SE ref1 Bell Telephones personnel of ref1 Bennet, Natalie leader of Green Party ref1 bicycles ref1 fatalities associated with ref1 sales of ref1 use in commuting ref1 big data ref1 Birmingham Science Park Aston Innovation Birmingham Complex ref1 Bold Rocket ref1 bonuses ref1 use in property market ref1 Boston Consulting Group ref1, ref2 British Bars and Pubs Association ref1 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) BBC Scotland ref1 Brough, Graham ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2 Burkina Faso Ouagadougou ref1 Burt, Prof Ronald ref1, ref2 Cable and Wireless assets of ref1 Cameron, David economic policies of ref1, ref2 immigration policies of ref1 Canada ref1 Montreal ref1 Toronto ref1, ref2 Vancouver ref1 capital rate of return ref1, ref2 capitalism ref1, ref2, ref3 profits ref1 Catholicism ref1 Centre for Cities ref1, ref2 Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 estimates of UK economic growth ref1 offices of ref1 personnel of ref1, ref2 Centre for Retail Research ref1, ref2 champagne sales figures ref1, ref2 Channel 4 ref1 China Beijing ref1, ref2, ref3 Haidian district ref1 economy of ref1 Golden Shield firewall (Great Firewall of China) ref1 government of ref1, ref2, ref3 Hong Kong ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Cyberport ref1 Hong Kong Stock Exchange ref1 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ref1, ref2 special economic zones Hangzhou ref1 Shenzhen ref1 Zhongguancun Innovation Way (Z-innoway) ref1 China Mobile ref1 China Telecom ref1 China Unicom ref1 Cisco Systems facilities of ref1 cloud computing ref1, ref2 Coalition Government immigration policy of ref1, ref2 coffee shops culture of ref1 cyber cafes ref1 growth of market ref1 Commonwealth migration from ref1 Companies House ref1 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) ref1, ref2 personnel of ref1 Confucianism ref1 Conservative Party ref1 Cooper, Wayne ref1 Corporation of London ref1, ref2, ref3 Crafts, Nick ref1 creative economy ref1 Cridland, John leader of CBI ref1 Cromwell, Oliver ref1 Crow, Bob ref1 Daily Mail ref1 Danone ref1 Danticat, Edwidge ref1 Davis, Charles ref1 Decoded ref1 Deloitte ref1 deregulation of financial markets (1986) ref1 digital economy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 emergence of ref1, ref2 role of creativity in ref1 Dorling, Danny ref1 Dunne, Ronan CEO of O2 (UK) ref1 Durden, Tyler ref1 Economic Journal, The ref1, ref2 Economist, The ref1, ref2, ref3 Edinburgh University ref1 Eggers, Dave Circle, The (2013) ref1 Egypt Cairo ref1 share of GDP ref1 employment ref1 growth ref1 immigrant labour ref1 in FWE ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 job creation ref1 low-skilled jobs ref1 public sector 1112 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) ref1 growth of ref1 shortages ref1 end user demand ref1 Engels, Friedrich ref1 Entrepreneurs for the Future (E4F) ref1 entrepreneurship ref1, ref2, ref3 e.Republic Center for Digital Government and Digital Communities Digital Cities award programme ref1, ref2 Esquire (magazine) ref1 European Economic Area (EEA) ref1 migrants from ref1 contribution to fiscal system ref1 migrants from outside ref1 contribution to fiscal system ref1 European Union (EU) free movement of labour in ref1 member states of ref1, ref2, ref3 taxation regulations ref1 Eurostar ref1 Eurozone ref1, ref2 Crisis (2009–) ref1, ref2, ref3 economy ref1 Facebook ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 IPO of ref1 Falmouth University ref1 Fan, Donald Senior Director for Office for Diversity of Walmart ref1 FanDuel ref1 Farage, Nigel leader of UKIP ref1 feudalism ref1 financial services ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 lifestyles associated with ref1, ref2 Financial Times (FT) ref1 FT Global Top 500 Companies ref1 Fintech ref1 First World War (1914–18) ref1 fiscal transfer ref1, ref2, ref3 net ref1 potential use to cover local deficits ref1 Flat White Economy (FWE) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 advantages of immigration for ref1, ref2, ref3 business model for ref1 development and growth of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 employment in ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 shortages ref1 impact on UK economy ref1, ref2 model of ref1, ref2, ref3 replicating ref1-ref2 role of creativity in ref1 startups in ref1 business model ref1 Flat Whiters ref1 accommodation data for ref1 social culture of ref1 fashion ref1 nightlife ref1 transport ref1 technology used by ref1 Forbes (magazine) ref1 France ref1 education system of ref1 Paris ref1, ref2, ref3 share of GDP ref1 Paris-Sarclay ref1 creation of (2006) ref1 potential limitations of ref1 promotion of ICT in ref1 Forst and Sullivan ref1 France ref1, ref2 Freeman, Prof Christopher ref1 Fujitsu Ltd. ref1 Funding Circle ref1 Gates, Bill ref1 Germany ref1, ref2, ref3 Berlin ref1 economy of ref1 Glaeser, Edward ref1 Triumph of the City, The ref1 Global Financial Crisis (2007–9) ref1, ref2 Banking Crises (2008) ref1 impact on migration ref1 UK recession (2008–9) ref1 Global Innovation Index ref1 globalisation ref1, ref2, ref3 Glyn, Andrew ref1 Goodison, Sir Nicholas Chairman of the Stock Exchange ref1 Google, Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 acquisitions made by ref1 development kits ref1 offices of ref1, ref2 Greater London Authority (GLA) ref1, ref2 Green Party members of ref1 Gröningen Growth and Development Centre ref1 Guardian, The ref1, ref2, ref3 Harbron, Rob ref1, ref2 Harrison, Andy Chief Executive of Whitbread ref1 Harvard Business School ref1 Harvard University Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis ref1 HCL Technologies ref1 Heisnberg, Werner uncertainty principle ref1 Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) ref1 Huawei Technologies ref1 immigration ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 advantages for FWE ref1, ref2, ref3 economic impact of ref1, ref2 impact on social cohesion ref1 impact on wages ref1 legislation ref1 access to state benefits ref1 quota systems ref1 non-EEA ref1, ref2 restrictions on ref1, ref2, ref3 Imperial College, London facilities of ref1 India ref1, ref2 Calcutta ref1 IT sector of ref1 Karnataka ref1 Bangalore ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Electronics City ref1 Mumbai ref1 inequality ref1 potential role of London in ref1, ref2 sources of wealth ref1 Infosys Ltd ref1 initial public offering (IPOs) ref1 innovation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 hubs ref1, ref2 independent ref1 investments in ref1 projects ref1 Institute for Public Policy Research ref1 intellectual property protection of ref1, ref2 Intel Corporation ref1, ref2, ref3 facilities of ref1 personnel of ref1 International Business Machines (IBM) ref1, ref2 facilities of ref1, ref2, ref3 personnel of ref1, ref2, ref3 internet usage ref1 investment ref1, ref2, ref3 advertising and marketing ref1 capitalising of ref1 in innovation ref1 process of ref1 Israel ref1, ref2 Defence Ministry ref1 Haifa ref1 tech sector of ref1 IT spending ref1, ref2 accounting for ref1 software ref1 Italy ref1 Frascati ref1 Rome ref1 ITC Infotech India Ltd ref1 Japan ref1 economy of ref1 Tokyo ref1 share of GDP ref1 Johnson, Boris Mayor of London ref1, ref2, ref3 Johnson Press plc ref1 Judaism ref1 Kaldor, Nicholas ref1 Keynes, John Maynard ref1 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The ref1 KPMG ref1 labour ref1 division of ref1 immigrant ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 market ref1 shocks ref1 share of income ref1, ref2 supply of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Labour Party ref1 immigration policies of ref1 Lai, Ian ref1 Laserfiche ref1 Lawson, Nigel ref1 Leeds Beckett University ref1 Level 39 ref1 Liberal Democrats immigration policies of ref1 lifestyles ref1 associated with financial services ref1 Livingstone, Ken ref1 Lloyds ref1 London School of Economics (LSE) ref1 MadRat games ref1 MagnetWorks Engineering ref1 Mahindra Satyam ref1 Mainelli, Michael Gresham Professor of Commerce ref1 Malaysia ref1 Kuala Lumpur ref1 Manchester Science Parks (MSP) ref1 market capitalisation ref1, ref2 market economy ref1 Marx, Karl ref1, ref2 Labour Theory of Value ref1 Marxism ref1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ref1 campuses of ref1 Technology Review ref1, ref2 MasterCard ref1 McAfee, Inc. ref1 McKinsey Global Institute ref1 McQueen, Alexander ref1 McWilliams, Sir Francis ref1 Pray Silence for Jock Whittington (2002) ref1 Medvedev, Dmitry ref1 technology policies of ref1 Metcalfe, Robert ref1 Metcalfe’s Law concept of ref1 Mexico ref1 Mexico City ref1 share of GDP ref1 Microsoft Corporation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 facilities of ref1 Future Decoded conference ref1 personnel of ref1 Windows (operating system) ref1 Migration Advisory Committee ref1 Miliband, Ed immigration policies of ref1 MindCandy ref1 Moshi Monsters ref1 offices of ref1 Mitsui Chemicals ref1 Mohan, Mukund CEO of Microsoft Ventures in India ref1 Mongolia Ulan Bator ref1 Moore, Gordon Earle Moore’s Law ref1 MphasiS ref1 National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) ref1, ref2 Netherlands Amsterdam ref1 network effects ref1 relationship with supereconomies of scale ref1 Network Rail offices of ref1 New Scientist ref1 New Statesman ref1 Nitto Denko ref1 Nokia Oyj ref1 O2 (Telefónica UK Limited) ref1 offices of ref1 personnel of ref1 Office of Communications (Ofcom) ref1 Olympic Games (2012) ref1, ref2 online shopping ref1, ref2 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Osborne, George ref1 Outblaze ref1 Pareto Principle concept of ref1 Passenger Demand Forecasting Council ref1 PayPal ref1 PCCW ref1 Poland accession to EU (2004) ref1 Pollock, Erskine ref1 Procter & Gamble Co. ref1 property markets ref1, ref2 commercial ref1, ref2 housebuilding ref1, ref2 house/property prices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 property crisis (2007) ref1 residential ref1 use of bonuses in ref1 public spending ref1, ref2, ref3 Barnett formula ref1 relationship with taxation ref1 Qualcomm facilities of ref1 Reinartz, Werner ref1 Republic of Ireland ref1 research and development (R&D) ref1, ref2, ref3 definitions of ref1, ref2 expenditure ref1, ref2 hubs ref1, ref2 industrial ref1 Research Council for the Arts and Humanities ‘Diasporas, Migration and Identities’ ref1 Rogers, Everett Diffusion of Innovations (1962) ref1 Russian Federation ref1 economy of ref1 Defence Ministry ref1 Moscow ref1, ref2 Skolkovo Innovation Centre ref1, ref2 Saffert, Peter ref1 sales and advertising ref1 Sarkozy, Nicolas technology policies of ref1 Scottish Media Group (STV) ref1 Second World War (1939–45) Blitz, The (1940–1) ref1 shared accommodation ref1 Silicon Canal ref1 Silicon Roundabout ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Silicon Valley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 role of US government defence spending in development of ref1 social culture of ref1 Silva, Rohan Senior Policy Advisor to David Cameron ref1 Singapore ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 government of ref1 Research, Innovation and Enterprise Plan (RIE 2015) ref1 research centres of ref1 A*Star Biopolis ref1 Fusionopolis ref1 Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (Create) ref1 CleanTech Park ref1 Singapore Science Park ref1 Tuas Biomedical Park ref1 skills drain ref1 Skyscanner ref1 small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) ref1 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ref1 Small Business Service Household Survey of Entrepreneurship ref1 Smith, Adam Wealth of Nations, The ref1 Smith, Michael Acton founder of MindCandy ref1 Social Democratic Party (SDP) formation of (1981) ref1 social media ref1 restrictions on ref1 Solow, Robert ref1 South Africa Johannesburg share of GDP ref1 South East Regional Assembly ref1 South Korea Seoul ref1 share of GDP ref1 Spain Barcelona ref1 Ibiza ref1 Sprint Corporation ref1 startups ref1 business models of ref1 in FWE ref1 Stigler, George ref1 supereconomies of scale concept of ref1 relationship with network effects ref1 Sweden Stockholm share of GDP ref1 Tata Consultancy Services ref1 taxation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 allowance ref1 corporation ref1 EU regulations ref1 National Insurance ref1, ref2, ref3 regional variation of ref1 relationship with public spending ref1 Tech City ref1, ref2, ref3 technology clusters ref1, ref2, ref3 identification of ref1 Techstars/Barclays ref1 telecommunications ref1 Thatcher, Margaret ref1, ref2 Thile, Peter ref1 trade unions ref1 Transport for London (TfL) ref1, ref2 UK Independence Party (UKIP) members of ref1, ref2 United Kingdom (UK) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Bath ref1 Birmingham ref1, ref2 Bristol ref1 Cambridge ref1 Cheshire ref1 Civil Service ref1 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills ref1, ref2 Department for Transport ref1 economy of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 contribution of creative industries to ref1 growth of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Edinburgh ref1 GDP per capita ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Glasgow ref1, ref2 media clusters in ref1 government of ref1, ref2, ref3 Index of Multiple Deprivation ref1 ‘Innovation Report 2014’ ref1 Hounslow ref1 labour market of ref1 Leeds ref1, ref2, ref3 London ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23 business sector of ref1 Camden ref1, ref2 City Fringes ref1, ref2 City of London ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 cultural presence of ref1 economy of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 migrant labour in ref1 expansion of ref1, ref2, ref3 GDP per capita ref1, ref2 GVA of ref1, ref2, ref3 Hackney ref1, ref2, ref3 Haringey ref1, ref2 Islington ref1, ref2 Old Street ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 share of national GDP ref1 Shoreditch ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Tower Hamlets ref1 transport infrastructure of ref1 Crossrail ref1 Westminster ref1, ref2, ref3 Manchester ref1, ref2, ref3 Midlands ref1 Milton Keynes ref1, ref2 Newbury ref1 Newcastle ref1 Northern Ireland ref1 Northampton ref1 Office for National Statistics (ONS) ref1 Oxford ref1 Parliament House of Commons ref1 House of Lords ref1 pub industry of ref1 Reading ref1 Salford ref1 Slough ref1 United States of America (USA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Baltimore, MD ref1 Boston, MA ref1, ref2 Buffalo, NY ref1 Cambridge, MA ref1 Chicago, IL ref1 Columbus, OH ref1 Detroit, MI ref1 economy of ref1 government of ref1, ref2 Irving, TX ref1 Jacksonville, FL ref1 Los Angeles, CA ref1 Minneapolis, MN ref1 Nashville, TN ref1 New York City, NY ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ref1 Palo Alto, CA ref1 Portland, OR ref1, ref2 Raleigh, NC ref1 Salt Lake City, UT ref1 San Diego, CA ref1 San Francisco, CA ref1 Seattle, WA ref1, ref2 Washington DC ref1 Winston-Salem, NC ref1 University of Chicago faculty of ref1, ref2 University of London ref1 University of Sussex faculty of ref1 venture capital ref1, ref2 Visa facilities of ref1 Vodafone offices of ref1 wages ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 depression of ref1, ref2 growth of ref1 impact of immigration on ref1 low ref1, ref2 Walmart personnel of ref1, ref2 Waze acquired by Google ref1 We Are Apps ref1 Whitbread Costa Coffee ref1 personnel of ref1 Wikipedia ref1 Wilson, Harold ref1 administration of ref1 Wipro Technologies ref1 Wired (magazine) ref1 Woolfe, Steven UKIP spokesman on migration and financial affairs ref1 World Bank ref1 Xiaomi ref1 Yorkshire Post, The ref1 ZopNow ref1


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Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, cleantech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The high level of technology literacy is coupled in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries with high-speed internet access, itself a result of public infrastructure investments, to create a propitious environment for innovation and knowledge-intensive technology and helping to grow firms in biotech, ICT, and cleantech industries. A particularly vibrant metropolitan area for the new economy is the Øresund Region, which has a population of nearly four million (including Copenhagen and Malmö) and accounts for more than a quarter of the combined Danish and Swedish GDP (equivalent to about half of the Danish GDP). With twelve universities and about a hundred and fifty thousand students, this high-tech corridor supports thousands of leading-edge companies in ICT, cleantech, and life sciences—mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, but also such established names as Haldor Topsøe, Coloplast, Novo Nor-disk, and Lundbeck (not to mention global giants like Google and IBM with a strong local presence).

Home to some of Ger-many’s heavy industry after the war—chemicals, steel, and shipbuilding—it suffered greatly from deindustrialization in the 1980s, with high levels of unemployment and population decline, but since the 1990s it has made a remarkable comeback and now has the highest GDP per capita of any German city with The Economist rating it the most livable city in 2017. The revival has been centered around a diverse set of innovative service industries in finance, life sciences, ICT, cleantech, media and creative industries, as well as trade (it is home to the second largest container harbor in Europe). In many ways Hamburg resembles the Øresund Region and is built on the same raw material: an expansive cluster of high-educated workers supplied by more than a dozen universities and technical universities in the region as well as from around Europe.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"Robert Solow", agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, cleantech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Indeed, military historian Edward Luttwak estimates that many postarmy Israelis have visited over a dozen countries by age thirty-five.8 Israelis thrive in new economies and uncharted territory in part because they have been out in the world, often in pursuit of the Book. One example of this avid internationalism is Netafim, an Israeli company that has become the largest provider of drip irrigation systems in the world. Founded in 1965, Netafim is a rare example of a company that bridges Israel’s low-tech, agricultural past to the current boom in cleantech. Netafim was created by Simcha Blass, the architect of one of the largest infrastructure projects undertaken in the early years of the state. Born in Poland, he was active in the Jewish self-defense units organized in Warsaw during World War I. Soon after arriving in Israel in the 1930s, he became chief engineer for Mekorot, the national water company, and planned the pipeline and canal that would bring water from the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee to the arid Negev.

One local headline declared that Israel had become an Internet “superpower.”5 Vardi invests in Internet start-ups because he believes in them. But his dogged focus on the Internet when almost everyone else was in either classic “Israeli” sectors, such as communications and security, or hot new areas, like cleantech and biotech, is not attributable just to profit calculation. For one, Israel is his cluster, and he is conscious of his status as an “insider” in this community—a community that he wants to succeed. And with that commitment, he is also conscious of his role in sustaining this sector through a dry spell.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, cleantech, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

She has also written for Fast Company, Pacific Standard Magazine, Spin, Good Magazine, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and other print and Web outlets. She is based in Washington, D.C., and is particularly interested in cities, public policy, and strange ideas. Roman Gaus is the founder and CEO of UrbanFarmers, a pioneering clean-tech company that develops sustainable agriculture systems for urban applications. In his previous life, he was a corporate maverick in the food and health space in Europe and North America. He is married to Martina Gaus and has two young boys who keep him busy. Diana Lind is Next City’s executive director and editor-in-chief.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zipcar

In 1996, GM started leasing a production version of that car in California and Arizona under the name EV1. The EV1 was a sporty two-door model that could accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in 6.3 seconds. Drivers gained entry to the car with a keypad instead of a key. It quickly found a cult following among clean-tech enthusiasts and was driven by film stars such as Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson. However, no one could own the vehicle. Just 1,117 EV1s were ever made, and they were offered by lease only, ostensibly so GM could ensure quality repairs. The automaker soon found reason to end even that meager offering.

Walker tweeted that Musk’s apparent disdain for public transport was a “luxury (or pathology) that only the rich can afford.” Musk responded on Twitter by calling Walker an “idiot.” But then he apologized and corrected himself, clarifying that he meant to say “sanctimonious idiot.” Mitt Romney: In a debate with President Obama, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee named Tesla among a group of clean-tech companies that had received government funding, labeling them “losers.” Romney “was right about the object of that statement,” Musk would later say, “but not the subject.” Since his teenage years, Musk has known what it’s like to be the victim of bullies. His responses to critics, fair or not, suggest he has no intention of ever again putting himself in such a position of submission.


pages: 412 words: 113,782

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, cleantech, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

Energy companies have a choice: to embrace the future … or ignore reality, and slowly—but surely—be left behind. MIKE BOWLIN, former chairman and CEO, ARCO, and chairman, American Petroleum Institute Embracing the future certainly sounds good. Who could be against something like that? And yet, many have resisted the invitation for one very good reason: Clean-tech energy sources from solar, wind, and biomass just have been too expensive. Pull out the rug of government subsidies and they’d collapse overnight, wouldn’t they? There is more than a kernel of truth to that, though I’m pretty sure that if all the perverse subsidies for oil, coal, gas, and nuclear energy sources were removed and the externalities incorporated into prices, we might see much the same thing happen to them.

Brush, designed the first wind turbine to generate electricity. His company, Brush Electric in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up to become part of General Electric. And Charles Fritts was the American inventor who created the first working solar cell in 1884. Yet today American industry takes a backseat to German, Japanese, Chinese, even Danish, clean-tech companies. Why have we allowed it? Could all the perverse incentives that make nineteenth-century energy and technology appear cheaper have something to do with our failure to grasp the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first? This must change, and putting all our faith in the blind-as-a-bat market won’t get it done.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon footprint, centre right, cleantech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Strategic Defense Initiative, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Schwarzenegger had slammed arguments made by Texan oil refiners that suspending AB32 would create jobs as like “Eva Braun writing a kosher cookbook.”17 The Californian establishment was mobilized. George Shultz was co-chairman of pro-AB32 Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs group. Conceding that some companies were worried about the cost of AB32, “the new regulations will boost the state’s economy by creating ‘clean-tech jobs,’” claimed Ronald Reagan’s former secretary of state and Richard Nixon’s director of Office of Management and Budget.18 What AB32 supporters lacked in intellectual edge, they more than made up with an overwhelming money advantage. They cried foul about out-of-state oil money when the real story was the money pouring in behind AB32 to defeat Prop. 32.

As Mark Mills puts it, Silicon Valley believes that Moore’s Law—that computer processing power doubles every couple of years—applies to renewable energy technologies and will make them economic.2 A myriad of venture capital speeches and pitches analogized clean tech as an emerging revolution akin to the digital disruption in computing and telephony, Mills says. In over a decade, more than $25 billion was invested in clean-tech ventures, plus another $50 billion in federal grants and gifts. Nearly everyone lost money. Clean tech became a dirty word in most venture capital circles. The limitations of physics and the chemistry of energy impose fundamental constraints that are not analogous to the miniaturization that has driven the exponential growth of IT speeds.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, cleantech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

National policymakers find that these cities fundamentally alter the migration patterns of workers, set new business and service standards and have a major impact on the number and kind of international firms, capital and visitors that a nation attracts. The previous cycles, in which world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo thrived, hinged on cities playing hub roles in finance, business, media, leisure tourism and commodities. In the current cycle, science, medicine, ICT, cleantech, traded urban services, higher education, design and real estate are now prominent activities for globalising cities. World cities have also become complex visitor economies – not just attracting holidaymakers but also students, researchers, events and congresses. Established and emerging world cities all compete for investors, entrepreneurs and start‐ups by focusing on liveability, culture and urban regeneration.

The conversation about London as a world city still tends to refer to its built-up area within the M25, and ignores the functional commuter region, even though it houses four of the region’s six airports, two of the region’s four leading global universities and significant parts of the region’s growth clusters in life sciences, digital media, ICT and cleantech. These new growth sectors have a more complex regional geography than do finance and business services, and require their own opportunity framework. As part of the ongoing adjustment to London as a world city region, national policy will also need to undertake a full review of the future of the Green Belt, regional infrastructure and institutions in order to manage London’s real economy and quality of life in an integrated way.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, computer age, congestion charging, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, game design, garden city movement, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Hill, “New Challenges Demand New Solutions: IBEW Leader Charts Energy Future,” EnergyBiz, September/October 2007, http://energycentral.fileburst.com/EnergyBizOnline/2007-5-sep-oct/Financial_Front_New_Challenges.pdf. 43Martin Rosenberg, “Continental Grid Vision Needed,” RenewableEnergyWorld.com blog, last modified December 11, 2007, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2007/12/continental-grid-vision-needed-50777. 44“Company development 1847–1865,” Siemens, n.d., http://www.siemens.com/history/en/history/1847_1865_beginnings_and_initial _expansion.htm. 45Jeff St. John, “How Siemens is Tackling the Smart Grid,” GigaOM, last modified June 24, 2010, http://gigaom.com/cleantech/how-siemens-is-tackling-the-smart-grid/. 46“Siemens CEO Peter Löscher: We’re on the threshold of a new electric age,” Siemens press release, December 15, 2010, http://www.siemens.com/press/en/pressrelease/?press=/en/pressrelease/2010/corporate_communication/axx20101227.htm. 47“75% of US Electric Meters to be Smart Meters by 2016,” In-Stat press release, March 5, 2012, http://www.fiercetelecom.com/press-releases/75-us-electric-meters-will-be-smart-meters-2016. 48Chris Nelder, “Why baseload power is doomed,” SmartPlanet, blog, last modified March 28, 2012, http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/why-baseload-power-is-doomed/445. 49Massoud Amin, “North American Electricity Infrastructure: System Security, Quality, Reliability, Availability, and Efficiency Challenges and their Societal Impacts,” in Continuing Crises in National Transmission Infrastructure: Impacts and Options for Modernization, National Science Foundation (NSF), June 2004. 50Fitze, “No Longer A One-Way Street,” 23. 51Tim Schröder, “Automation’s Ground Floor Opportunity,” Pictures of the Future, Spring 2011, 19, http://www.siemens.com/innovation/apps/pof_microsite/_pof-spring-2011/_pdf/pof_0111_strom_buildings_en.pdf. 52Eric Paulos, lecture, “Forum on Future Cities,” MIT SENSEable City Lab and the Rockefeller Foundation, Cambridge, MA, April 13, 2011, http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/senseable/videos/12305-changing-research; For a thorough treatment see Eric Paulos and James Pierce, “Citizen Energy: Towards Populist Interactive Micro-Energy Production,” n.d., http://www.paulos.net/papers/2011/Citizen_Energy_HICSS2011.pdf. 53James R.

Borge-Holthoefer et al., “Structural and Dynamical Patterns on Online Social Networks: The Spanish May 15th Movement as a Case Study,” PLoS ONE, (2011); doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023883. 29April Kilcrease, “A Conversation with Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith,” GigaOM, last modified December 5, 2011, http://gigaom.com/cleantech/a-conversation-with-zipcars-ceo-scott-griffith/. 30Ron Lieber, “Share Your Car, Risk Your Insurance,” New York Times, last modified March 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/your-money/auto-insurance/enthusiastic-about-car-sharing-your-insurer-isnt.html?pagewanted=all. 31“Our Carbon Footprint,” Corporate Responsibility Report, InterContinental Hotel Groups, 2011, http://www.ihgplc.com/index.asp?


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Bernie Madoff, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cleantech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Green, June 7, 2007, http://green.yahoo.com/blog/amorylovins/1/saving-the-climate-for-fun-and-profit.html. 2 Michael Mechanic, “Power Q&A: Amory Lovins,” Mother Jones, May/June 2008, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/power-qa-amory-lovins. 3 Stone Phillips, “A Simple Solution to Pain at the Pump?” Dateline NBC, May 7, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12676374/. 4 Dana Childs, “Cellulosic Ethanol to Be Cost-Competitive by 2009, Says Khosla,” Cleantech.com, March 23, 2007, http://cleantech.com/news/928/cellulosic-ethanol-to-be-cost-competiti. 5 National Public Radio, “Al Gore’s Speech on Renewable Energy,” July 17, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92638501. 6 Al Gore, “The Climate for Change,” New York Times, November 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09gore.html. 7 Ted McKenna, “New Al Gore Campaign Applies Ads, Media for Grassroots Effort,” PR Week, April 4, 2008. 8 Wecansolveit.org, “Grassroots Partners,” http://www.wecansolveit.org/pages/partners/. 9 Jennifer Alsever, “Pickens’ Natural Gas Idea Picking Up Steam,” MSNBC, October 21, 2008, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27052462/. 10 Pickens Plan, http://media.pickensplan.com/pdf/pickensplan.pdf. 11 WorldPublicOpinion.org, “World Publics Strongly Favor Requiring More Wind and Solar Energy, More Efficiency, Even If It Increases Costs,” November 19, 2008, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/btenvironmentra/570.php. 12 League of Conservation Voters, “Board of Directors,” http://www.lcv.org/about-lcv/board-of-directors/ (accessed December 29, 2008). 13 League of Conservation Voters, “Repower, Refuel, and Rebuild America,” http://action.lcv.org/campaign/repower_d (accessed December 29, 2008). 14 NBC Universal, “Company Overview,” http://www.nbcuni.com/About_NBC_Universal/Company_Overview/. 15 The Daily Beast, “Top 9 Moments from Miss USA,” April 20, 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-20/the-best-and-worst-of-the-miss-usa-pageant/. 16 U.S.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, cleantech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liquidity trap, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

A carbon tax that rose steadily over time would provide some predictability for businesses, enable them to better plan long-term investments and encourage them to try to develop new low-carbon technologies. It would also give clean-tech companies a good idea of the price target they need to achieve to be competitive, allowing them to raise funds and have a go at developing promising technologies. Importantly, governments wouldn’t be trying to second-guess the best technologies or pick winners among the many clean-tech companies. A carbon tax would be flexible: it could be raised or lowered at will, depending on how conditions evolve. It would be transparent and impartial, imposing the same price on all firms, with no opaque special favours for politically connected companies.


pages: 300 words: 77,787

Investing Demystified: How to Invest Without Speculation and Sleepless Nights by Lars Kroijer

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, BRICs, Carmen Reinhart, cleantech, compound rate of return, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, estate planning, fixed income, high net worth, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Rogoff, market bubble, money market fund, passive investing, pattern recognition, prediction markets, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

In other words, in this case you may not be holding US government bonds in the way you would be if there were no tax issues, but the municipal bonds are fairly similar and the tax advantage renders this compromise well worthwhile. Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) or equivalent In the UK there are certain tax advantages or government subsidies in making start-up and certain types of clean-tech investments. Depending on your tax rate these are well worth knowing about. Your tax adviser should know all about them (these are outside the scope of this book). Gifts Instead of realising a capital gain it may be advantageous to gift securities to your spouse and have him or her make the sale (thus utilising your spouse’s CGT allowance).


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, cleantech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In its general outlines, if not specifics, it’s a widely applicable vision of economic life. Plenitude is also about transition. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Creating a sustainable economy will take decades, and this is a strategy for prospering during that shift. The beauty of the approach is that it is available right now. It does not require waiting for the clean-tech paradigm to triumph. It doesn’t require getting government on board immediately. Anyone can get started, and many are. It was the right way to go before the economic collapse, in part because it predicted a worsening landscape. It makes even more sense in a period of slow growth or stagnation. As individuals take up the principles of plenitude, they are not merely adopting a private response to what is perforce a collective problem.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler

She has found that the key is to listen carefully, probe beneath the idea by trying to discover its root, and then finding ways to make connections with arenas with which she’s more familiar. Ellen doesn’t know that much about the technologies underlying clean tech, for example. But she sits on a number of clean-tech advisory boards. Why? Because her colleagues value her ability to recognize patterns and connect the dots. Who knew what the big-box retailer could learn from electric car making? In the process, Ellen has discovered that framing the right question is often the best way to add value. Often, diverse groups have a hard time engaging with each other because they all have a different question in mind or simply are not clear about the question at hand.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, call centre, cleantech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Doerr joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980 and has been called “the Michael Jordan of venture capital,” a hall-of-fame moneyman, one of the best ever to play the game. Doerr’s big hits include Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Netscape, and Google. But somewhere in the 2000s he seemed to lose his touch, making bad bets on so-called cleantech (renewable energy) start-ups while missing out on big hits like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla. “Doerr made (Kleiner) the gold standard of venture firms” but he “is also largely responsible for the firm’s fall,” tech blog Pando wrote in 2013. Doerr has a degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Another way households can harness the power of the market is by buying clean-energy products. It’s difficult for a family to buy its own nuclear reactor (as it probably should be), but easy to buy solar panels and batteries. Even if this purchase is more of an experiment than a complete home-energy makeover, it serves an important purpose: it signals demand for clean-tech products. As we’ve seen over and over, markets respond to this demand signal by increasing supply and boosting investment and R&D. Increased demand also causes more competition, which drives down prices. The prices of battery and solar energy products have been dropping rapidly. The surest way to sustain and accelerate these huge price declines is to keep increasing demand for clean-energy products.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cleantech, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

As Alstom notes in December 2013 when putting in the largest wind farm offshore, “Thanks to a permanent-magnet generator, there are less mechanical parts inside the device, making it more reliable and thus helping to reduce operating and maintenance costs.” Alstom, “Alstom Installing World’s Largest Offshore Wind Turbine off the Belgian Coast,” November 2013, http://www.alstom.com/press-centre/2013/11/alstom-installing-worlds-largest-offshore-wind-turbine; Margaret Schleifer, “The Giant Wind Gamble,” Cleantech Investor, 2014, http://www.cleantechinvestor.com/portal/wind-energy/9552-the-giant-wind-gamble.html. 8. The gearboxes convert the 15–20 rpms into higher speeds of 1,800 rpms, which generates electricity. April Nowicki and Peter Bronski, “Are Direct-Drive Turbines the Future of Wind Energy?” Earthtechling, February 2013, http://earthtechling.com/2013/02/are-direct-drive-turbines-the-future-of-wind-energy/; Frank J.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon footprint, clean water, cleantech, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

See also UNEP, “Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2010 Report,” available at http://sefi.unep.org/english/globaltrends2010.html. 6. United States Energy Information Administration, statistics available at http://www.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity _home#tab2. 7. See summary article at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article /IEA-cleantech-low-carbon-energy-technology-emissio-pd20100705 -73F5M. 8. http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/sizing-low-carbon-economy. CHAPTER 13: SHIFTING SANDS 1. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05friedman.html. 2. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, clean water, cleantech, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

And as Barack Obama noted in his call to arms for America’s green economy, some of the key technologies developed in the United States have been refined and advanced by innovative and/or low-cost producers in China, India, Japan, Germany, Denmark, South Korea, and Taiwan. Today’s market leaders in solar cells, wind turbines, biomass, compact hydro, geothermal, and wave-generating energy include companies such as Voith Hydro in Germany, Vestas in Denmark, Suzlon Energy in India, and Sinovel, LDK Solar, Suntech, and DP CleanTech in China. About 10 km (6 miles) west of the Nevada border in southern California’s Mojave Desert, the beginnings of Obama’s sought-after technological energy fightback are taking shape. Here, in a hot and dry part of the world where the sun shines 340 days a year, BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah concentrated solar thermal power plant is being built, with a goal of full operation by mid-2013.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, blood diamonds, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cleantech, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

We're not stopping there. The next biggest change for airlines is likely to come in the form of low carbon fuels. Unlike ground energy and ground transport, it's pretty clear that airlines have no alternatives and are going to need liquid fuels for a long time yet. Which is why, in 2011, we partnered with exciting new cleantech company LanzaTech. Their ground-breaking approach makes fuels out of waste industrial gases. Did you know, for example, that many steel mills around the world produce carbon monoxide (CO) as a waste gas—and this is often flared (burned) off as CO2, directly into the atmosphere? LanzaTech captures and recycles the carbon in the waste CO, converting it into fuels via fermentation and other processes.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cleantech, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, computer age, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, Negawatt, off grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

” — Chellis Glendinning Author, Off the Map and Chiva “ Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was, in terms of both content and timing, one of the most important books ever.The very idea that we had this power was mind-bending.To the Earth’s everlasting sorrow, though, what should have been a wakeup call and the inspiration for a completely different course of action is in danger of becoming no more than an ‘I told you so!’” — Ingrid Witvoet Managing Editor, New Society Publishers “ Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring woke up many of us 50-somethings and 60-somethings who went on to create Earth Day, the EPA, and the green companies that are leading a clean-tech revolution in the marketplace.” — Kevin Danaher Cofounder, Global Exchange Co-Executive Producer, Green Festivals Executive Director, Global Citizen Center 50 chapter 2 : Silent Spring Silent Spring: The New Village Library Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. Penguin Books, 1970. The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, cleantech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, death of newspapers, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Net neutrality is one area in which the public debate over an issue that is central to our economy and civic society has been captured. Patents, as I covered extensively in chapter 5, is another. Over the past few years, I’ve heard disparate complaints from a variety of quarters—from start-up biotech firms, semiconductor and electronics firms, clean-tech companies, data analysis groups, universities, and innovators working on the Internet of things, as well as some of the venture capitalists that invest in these areas—that the patent system and the debate about how to structure it has been hijacked by the interests of the largest tech firms in the country.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, carbon footprint, cleantech, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

There was something intoxicating about working at the most elite financial institution in America. For analysts who worked for Goldman in its day, the rush you got from saying you worked there was the equivalent of how today’s graduates feel when they say they work for a “social impact fund” or a “cleantech startup in the Valley.” In the spring of 2006, I was a 20-year-old junior at Harvard College, and I fell for the trick. I joined Goldman Sachs that summer as an intern. By the end of June, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. People walked around Goldman Sachs with polished black leather shoes, pressed shirts, and Hugo Boss ties.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

They are pressured by activists and clients that demand it from them, or simply following rational concerns that fossil fuel plants will eventually become stranded assets, as former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned.38 And entrepreneurs and governments in India and China are starting to take action toward a carbon-light future as well, attracted by the improving affordability of cleantech versus fossil-fuel technologies. In this regard, the World Economic Forum is taking action as well. Ahead of our Annual Meeting in Davos in 2020, Brian Moynihan, chair of the international business council, Feike Sybesma, co-chair of the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, and I invited participants to join the “Net-Zero Challenge,”39 committing to achieving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

They are pressured by activists and clients that demand it from them, or simply following rational concerns that fossil fuel plants will eventually become stranded assets, as former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned.38 And entrepreneurs and governments in India and China are starting to take action toward a carbon-light future as well, attracted by the improving affordability of cleantech versus fossil-fuel technologies. In this regard, the World Economic Forum is taking action as well. Ahead of our Annual Meeting in Davos in 2020, Brian Moynihan, chair of the international business council, Feike Sybesma, co-chair of the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, and I invited participants to join the “Net-Zero Challenge,”39 committing to achieving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, cleantech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Hyperloop, income inequality, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

But, as with the early-stage failure pattern Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows, these late-stage startups stumble due to resource shortfalls of two types. The first relates to financing risk. Sometimes an entire industry sector suddenly falls out of favor with venture capital firms, as with biotech in the early 1990s or cleantech in the late 2000s. In the extreme, even healthy startups caught in a downdraft cannot attract new funds: Babies go out with the bathwater. Funding droughts take investors and entrepreneurs by surprise and can last for months or even years. If one of these dry spells commences just as a fast-growing startup is trying to raise a new funding round, and if that startup cannot rapidly reduce its spending, the venture may not survive.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, cleantech, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

This conflict of interest, rather than an altruistic concern about global warming, explains venture-capitalist support for the measure, oil companies say.” The proposition was defeated. Khosla had dismissed claims that he was conflicted by promising that if the proposition passed, he would donate every penny he made on his clean-tech investments to charity. “It would have cost me a lot of money. I had no conflict of interest. I had a negative incentive to support the proposition. But I care about where the world is going.” But he found that his pledge to give away any money he would make on clean energy seldom got reported.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Robert Solow", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cleantech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

Warren Buffett became a lead critic of this policy, admitting that he and most investors don't look at tax, they look at opportunities.12 Indeed, the VC industry, from when it began, followed the opportunities created by direct ‘mission-oriented' government investments in areas like the Internet, biotech, nanotech and cleantech. As we saw in Chapter 5, another crucial success for the NVCA came when it persuaded the US government to relax the interpretation of the ‘prudent man' investment rule (keeping pensions funds out of high-risk investments) to allow pension fund managers to invest up to 5 per cent of pension funds in riskier investments like VC ones.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, cleantech, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

It can be summoned using a mobile device, and passengers select their destination using an on-board touchscreen display. It does not require rails, overhead lines or other road modifications. Following comprehensive tests in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Singapore, it is planned to use it for transporting passengers between Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and JTC Corporation’s CleanTech Park. The joint venture partners United Technical Services and 2getthere have developed various versions of an automated people mover in recent years. Each version is designed as an on-demand non-stop transportation system between two points on a network with a maximum speed of 40 kilometres per hour (25 miles per hour) and a range of 60 kilometres (37 miles).


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

"Robert Solow", accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cleantech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Between 1991 and 2000 venture capital outlays in Israel rose sixtyfold, as private-sector investments overwhelmed an initial government subsidy program. A 2008 survey of the world’s venture capitalists by Deloitte & Touche showed that in six key fields—telecom, microchips, software, biotech, medical devices, and cleantech—Israel ranked second only to the United States in absolute terms. In the vital area of innovation in water use and conservation, it decisively led the world. Gaining half its water from desalinization plants, adopting inventive forms of drip irrigation, and recycling 95 percent of its sewage, Israel actually managed to reduce its net water usage by 10 percent since 1948.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

"Robert Solow", 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Sunil Paul and Nick Allen, “Inventing the Cleanweb,” MIT Technology Review, April 2, 2012, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427382/inventing-the-cleanweb/ (accessed August 17, 2013). 29. Paul Boutin, “The Law of Online Sharing,” MIT Technology Review, January/February 2012. 30. Yuliya Chernova, “New York’s Cleanweb Hackathon Sparks Green Ideas Where Cleantech and IT Intersect,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/10/02 /new-yorks-cleanweb-hackathon-sparks-green-ideas-where-clean-tech-and-it-intersect/ (accessed September 3, 2013); Martin LaMonica, “Cleanweb Hackers Get Busy with Energy Data,” CNET, January 23, 2012, http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-57363873-54/cleanweb-hackers -get-busy-with-energy-data/ (accessed September 3, 2013). 31.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, cleantech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, urban planning, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

“My core goal is to disrupt both the education and the game sectors,” he said, sounding like Peter Thiel. Thiel expressed concern that the company would attract people with a nonprofit attitude, who felt that “it’s not about making money, we’re doing something good, so we don’t have to work as hard. And I think this has been an endemic problem, parenthetically, in the clean-tech space, which has attracted a lot of very talented people who believe they’re making the world a better place.” “They don’t work as hard?” Hsu asked. “Have you thought about how to mitigate that problem?” “So you’re saying that might be a problem just because the company has an educational slant?”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamonds, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, food miles, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Envisioned as a test bed for every type of renewable energy under the sun—picture solar cells powering personal monorails instead of cars—Masdar is a retort to the unsustainable sprawl of Dubai. “One day, all cities will be built like this,” its backers promised, hinting at a multitrillion-dollar industry to follow. MIT faculty consulted on the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, while the emirate is trying to coax clean-tech companies to move here with the carrot of $250 million in seed money and the usual lures—no taxes, no oversight, and the great basin of two billion customers within a few hours’ flight. So far, there have been few takers; the opening has been pushed ahead until 2020 and plans for the city are under review.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, carried interest, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K

John Doerr, “Salvation (and profit) in Greentech,” TED2007, March 2007; Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, “Cleanup Crew,” Fortune 156, no. 11 (November 26, 2007). 18. Jon Gertner, “Capitalism to the Rescue,” The New York Times, October 3, 2008. 19. Jerry Hirsch, “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies,” The Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2015; Sarah McBride and Nichola Groom, “Insight: How cleantech tarnished Kleiner and VC star John Doerr,” Reuters Business News, January 15, 2013. 20. David Streitfeld, “Kleiner Perkins Denies Sex Bias in Response to a Lawsuit,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012; Ellen Huet, “Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Ellen Pao: A Mentorship Sours,” Forbes, March 4, 2015. 21.


pages: 900 words: 241,741

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean water, cleantech, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

Besides, it’s hard to relate to a polar bear on an ice floe when you’re out of a job, or worried about your health insurance or about educating your kids. I promoted the California Global Warming Solutions Act as good for business—not only large and established businesses but also entrepreneurial businesses. In fact we wanted to create a whole new clean-tech industry that would create jobs, develop cutting-edge technology, and become a model for the rest of the country and the world. Building a consensus was very hard, and the Global Warming Act was far from perfect. There were fierce disagreements internally and with legislators and interest groups.