VC Mike has the transcript of a brief talk VC Bob Metcalfe did on cleantech or as he dubs it, ‘Enertech’. The talk was five minutes long so the transcript is annotated with additional notes on each statement.

Here’s a snippet on how we can change things (annotations in Bold):

‘First, as it evolves to enhance its email, search, blogs, social networking, audio, and video capabilities, the Internet can increasingly be used to reduce energy consumption by massively substituting COMMUNICATION for TRANSPORTATION. Just think of all the automobile and airplane miles and attendant carbon emissions that will be saved by transmitting our BITS to meetings instead of lugging our ATOMS. Let’s try hard to attend these Massachusetts Enertech Cluster meetings in the future without actually going anywhere. Down with pressing the flesh!

Second, starting with today’s base of a billion users and Google, the Internet is becoming an unprecedented medium for COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE. More and more people are getting better and better information and communication tools that will be applied to the development of cheap and clean energy and to solve Global Warming. The Internet is helping accelerate intellectual progress exponentially, and as Ray Kurzweil ‘70 writes, the singularity is near.

And third, the people, processes, and institutions that built the Internet will themselves help bring the world cheap and clean energy. I’m talking here about the Internet’s teams of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. And I’m talking about actual Internet techies and FOCACA. Of course, like the Internet, solving the world’s energy problems will take about 30 years. By meeting here today, I hope we are aiming to help techies deliver cheap and clean energy faster than we delivered the Internet.’

Thanks to Paul Kedrosky.

Look at this building going up in Miami: better than a movie set. I wonder what will happen when its foundations are under water and it deals with howling storms 50% of the year?

The Joni Mitchell lyric in the title of this post has long been a favorite singalong for environmentalists and with good reason. In our urban/suburban sprawls, parking lots are the ultimate example of our disregard for the land, representing formerly open countryside now coated in asphalt and covered with cars. But there may be some redemption for this stark image of man blithely overrunning nature.

Google and other companies are building solar ‘trees’ (ironic choice of descriptive nomenclature) that provide shade to parked cars while serving as inexpensive, ideally situated platforms for solar power generation. Because these platforms can be optimized for solar collection they are often far more useful than rooftops. The open spaces already exist as parking lots and you can’t really complain that they are esthetically less pleasing than an expanse of concrete covered with vehicles.

A good example of short term improvements in the way we use commercial land. It might be interesting to calculate how much fuel might be saved by lessening the blast of AC required to cool off a car that has been sitting in the California sun all day!

There is now a global network of satellite environmental information called GEONETCast. Access is free and it is a resource for all kinds of projects worldwide. This is over my head so I’ve included a description from their site in this post:

“GEONETCast is a global network of satellite based data dissemination systems providing environmental data to a world-wide user community. The current partners within the GEONETCast initiative include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and EUMETSAT, as well as many prospective data provider partners.

Aim of GEONETCast
GEONETCast is a milestone in the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) that is being coordinated by the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO), and is designed to put a vast range of essential environmental data at the fingertips of users around the globe. This user-driven, user-friendly and low-cost information dissemination service aims to provide global information as a basis for sound decision-making in a number of critical areas, including public health, energy, agriculture, weather, water, climate, natural disasters and ecosystems. Accessing and sharing such a range of vital data will yield societal benefits through improved human health and well-being, environment management and economic growth.
Within the existing framework, GEONETCast is already partially realising this goal with environmental data exchange and data delivery available in Europe, Africa and the Americas. An additional data exchanged is now being established covering the Asia Pacific region.

The following products and services are being made available to the GEONETCast user community:
Meteosat image data
GOES East and West image data
FY-2 image data
Land and Ocean Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (SAF) products
EUMETSAT meteorological products
NOAA-NESDIS meteorological products
NOAA-NESDIS Ocean colour and sea surface temperature products
VEGETATION products from VITO
MODIS Ocean colour products
In-situ and observational data”