Kleiner Perkins on Competition

I attended a great seminar last night at MIT in which Ray Lane, a Managing Partner at KP and colleague of Al Gore, gave a thoughtful (and alarming) presentation on global energy. His thesis is, essentially, that the U.S. is getting blown out by China in the renewable energy race. While we still have the edge on innovation, he contends, China will quickly outstrip our country in terms of the more important elements of scale and competitiveness. The U.S. seems reluctant to make the hard choices – an objective carbon pricing strategy that encompasses all the costs of fossil fuel-fired economy on American life, a nationwide RPS strategy, fairness on federal and state energy tax credits and subsidies, and incentives for entrepreneurs to more quickly move energy innovation into the market. All this from the guy and his firm that jump started the IT craze from Oracle to Amazon. One thing was clear – in our slow paced and even slower thinking democracy it’s going to take a citizen revolution of some kind to keep us apace with China. Write your congressman. Better yet, pay him or her a visit.