I stumbled upon an interesting commentary today. It was published yesterday at sfgate.com by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Leading with “Flush with money and determined to save the world, the green-tech industry stands in full flower of its giddy youth.” The reporters proceed to deliver a briefing of their interview with Vinod Khosla, one of the most prominent capitalists funding “green” start-ups and “green” ventures.
The topic of this interview is the likely hood of a “green bubble” and how such an economic development would impact both the world economies and the “green” social movements.
A sensible venture capitalist, Khosla reasonably cites the number of economic “bubbles” that our capitalist history has seen slowly grow only to then pop quite viciously. He does not viw these bubbles as negative events. Instead, these bubbles are a normal element of the capitalist cycle. Like the wildfires in the prairie’s of the American west, these bubbles serve to clear a swathe to facilitate new growth and new reaping.
As a student of the social science of technology, I find Khosla’s comments to be quite compelling. It will be interesting to see what predictions come to fruition in this field of the economy.