Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
Global warming: Economic opportunity or not?
Stephan Dolezalek, Managing Director of VantagePoint Venture Partners and Tom Werner, Chief Executive of solar power company SunPower, sat down at Reuters’ Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco and shared their views on global warming, investment and cleantech.
Dolezalek sees industrialization in developing countries as a more predictable impetus for investment than global warming.
Werner sees global warming as a stimulus for new business and a tool for adaptation.
What are your thoughts? Is global warming an economic stimulus, an unreliable driver for investment, neither or both?
(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman, pictures by Kim White)
Kinder: wind, solar not the answer to U.S. energy needs
Rich Kinder, CEO of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, says the Obama Administration’s push to develop alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are not the answer to reducing the nation’s dependence on oil or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click below to hear where Kinder thinks the U.S. should be focusing its attention.
Kinder: wind, solar not the answer from Reuters TV on Vimeo.
yeah its the hydroelectric capacity that represents the largest amount of ‘renewables’. Yet, all hydro capacity has been tapped.
Any centralised economic stimulus that can be provided for the widespread expansion of energy efficiency technologies and sustainable energy production should be encouraged (after all many other industrial and financial sectors, since the onset of the current global recession have been supported in this way, which would otherwise have gone to the wall). The previous commentators denying that global warming is man made or even real at all makes me think of the huge numbers of supposedly learned people/philosophers/theologians who have, over the centuries, believed that the Earth is flat and not spherical. Furthermore anyone who underpins their arguments that the warming seen on this planet is purely from natural cycles over geological time-scales unwittingly shows themselves to have little understanding of the climate observations from the modern industrialised era. No one disbelieves that the climate has, over geological time, changed by vast extremes but the warming seen today is NOT on a geological time-scale and hence is an extremely real and current threat.