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When Bill Gates speaks about energy, we should listen. Not just because he’s still one of the richest people in the world, or because he did as much as anyone else living to design the world we live and work in. Rather, listen to Gates on energy because he knows what he’s talking about, linking [...]
Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said the phrase in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” It, in this case, was obscenity, and Stewart was making a point about the trickiness of properly defining the term. How do you have an argument about pornography if you can’t quite say what it is? For [...]
I have a piece in today’s magazine about General Electric’s big solar bet. The multinational behemoth—which has already built a $6 billion-plus wind turbine business—is now looking to move into solar manufacturing as well. That might be bad news for competitors like First Solar, but it’s good news for those who want to see solar [...]
My weekly Going Green column is up on the Time.com mainpage. It’s an interview with Jim Rogers, the CEO of Charlotte-based Duke Energy, soon to be the most powerful utility chief in the U.S. Rogers formed key corporate support for cap-and-trade, but with the political chances of that looking slim, he’s favoring an R&D, innovation-focused [...]
Tonight’s State of the Union may be remembered as the moment when the White House stopped working on climate—and started working on energy. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Whatever initiatives President Obama chooses to launch with his annual speech, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will likely keep working on greenhouse gas regulations, the [...]
It’s become fashionable among energy and climate thinkers to call for greatly boosted government investment in energy research, to face up to what Energy Secretary Steven Chu has called America’s “Sputnik moment.” Certainly that was the overriding message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 conference in Washington that I attended—though it wasn’t the only message. There [...]
That was one message from yesterday’s Energy Innovation 2010 summit at the National Press Club in Washington, put on by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Breakthrough Institute. And it came from a high-level source: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter. Richter—who helped put together a group of 34 Nobel laureates who sent a [...]
Readers of this blog will know that one of my pet issues is energy research and innovation. The U.S. invests an obscenely low amount of federal money on basic energy research—perhaps $5 billion a year, not counting one-time stimulus spending, compared to $30 billion and north of $70 billion annually for medicine and defense research. [...]
Update (8/14/10): A few additional voices in this argument. Over at his blog for the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Levi argues that government investment in research isn’t enough on its own to bring clean energy to parity with fossil-fuel power, in part because unlike previous innovations like the Internet, clean energy doesn’t offer much [...]
Bill Gates—through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—revolutionized the health world by focusing vast amounts of money on diseases of the developing world that hadn’t responded to traditional philanthropy. (That’s why TIME put Gates, his wife Melinda and U2 frontman Bono on the cover as People of the Year in 2005.) Lately, though, Gates has [...]
