

Kleiner Perkins Shifts Strategy After a Rough Decade - mcenedella
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/a-humbled-kleiner-perkins-adjusts-its-strategy/

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NoPiece
The silicon valley support for green/clean energy goes beyond rationality.
They were investing based on faith (or hoping for bigger government
intervention) and got burned.

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natrius
I think clean energy enthusiasm is rational. The scientific consensus is that
emissions are warming the planet, which will have large, undesirable effects.
A rational response to that is to limit emissions. We haven't done so, which
seems like the irrational link in the causality chain here.

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NoPiece
There a lot of reasons Kleiner was foolish without even touching the global
warming debate. $100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global
warming. There is cheap abundant politically connected dirty energy. There is
abundant clean cheap natural gas. Even people who believe that global warming
will have large undesirable effects aren't necessarily willing to spend more
money to do something about it. It isn't necessarily rational to bet on people
behaving rationally.

\-- edit: I am not arguing against electric cars, especially cheap ones. But
fancy Fisker $100k electric cars were rich people's vanity toys, not global
warming solutions.

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kiba
_$100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global warming._

Of course they are! With electric cars, it doesn't transmits carbon, plus it
can get cheaper energy from the grid. Of course, coal plants are still dirty,
but they are more efficient than using gasoline in ICE, and ICE only converts
like 30% to forward motion.

All that is left is to improve and drive the cost of solar panels into the
ground until they are competitive with oil and coal.

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rdl
I haven't seen a good analysis of gas (from the ground) to ICE in mpg, vs.
electricity from coal (in the ground) with grid losses and batteries, with the
capital costs of the vehicles amortized. I'm not sure what the best comparison
is -- dollars, kilos of CO2, other emissions, etc.?

Obviously the US grid isn't even 100% coal, and we're presumably moving toward
more and more NG and renewables at all times, but it would be interesting to
quantify this over time.

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jacobolus
A few years old, but a pretty decent start to your “good analysis”:
<http://www.withouthotair.com/>

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azernik
For the more specific answer to that question, the page is here:
<http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_131.shtml/>

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ankitml
Fisker was a bad investment choice by Kleiner, because they wanter to jump
onto the bandwagon of electric car. This is nothing new.

