(Note: This blog is co-authored with my colleague Jigar Shah, a partner at Inerjys and a board member of the Carbon War Room, where he served as its first CEO. Jigar also founded SunEdison, helping to create the multibillion-dollar solar services industry.)
To get back to some non-election topics…A couple weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an op-ed entitled “A Sad Green Story” about the (supposed) travails of the green movement over the last 10 years. The idea that the clean technology sector is failing, or that it’s a bad investment, is common enough in the business world and pundit class. But it’s patently false. So what is Brooks talking about and what’s really true here?
Brooks focuses in part on whether Al Gore has made money on clean tech — a total distraction that has no bearing on the reality of climate change or the growth of clean tech. What’s more important is Brooks’ absurd logic that an entire sector of the economy is a “sad story” because some government-supported companies struggle, go under (Solyndra), or get acquired (battery maker A123). And how can Brooks tear down the government’s involvement in promoting the deployment of American green innovation while providing no tangible idea of how he would do it better?
Most of us watching or working with the clean tech sector agree that government shouldn’t try to pick winners (see Jigar’s take on Solyndra’s failure here), but we can propose a plausible model of how the government might play a more productive role. This ranges from providing a roadmap for remaking the multitrillion-dollar energy sector, to providing leadership by example (and scale) when purchasing new technologies.
For proof of how crazy all of this criticism of clean tech is, we need look no further than a recent Times-reported story on natural gas. Natural gas is a booming industry. But as the paper of record reports, it turns out that one key part of the natural gas value chain — that is the step of actually digging it up — is struggling financially. Small, scrappy entrepreneurs like Exxon Mobil are, according to its CEO, “losing our shirts today… Were making no money. It’s all in the red.”
This is exactly the same economic story that Andrew described a few weeks ago about the solar industry. The manufacturing end of the chain, experiencing a glut of supply, is losing money. But downstream users of the product, solar panels in one case or natural gas in the other, are doing very well. The financial struggle for some companies in both solar and natural gas is a sign of a boom, not a bust.
So we assume David Brooks and other green skeptics will soon write about the “sad brown tale” of the (also) highly subsidized industry of fossil fuels, which, since some people are losing money, must be shut down and mocked. We’ll hold our breath.
Brooks’ column is also filled with fantasies and misstatements that would be easy to correct with a simple Google search. As Andrew mentioned in his previous blog post, the percentage of our electricity coming from green energy has doubled in just four years — that doesn’t seem like much of a sad story. Brooks also dismisses the idea of green jobs with no data to back up his position. Of course there are green jobs — there are 100,000 people working in solar in this country today. And, not for nothing, but the fastest growing green jobs markets are in politically red states. (We’ll stop there and let climate blogger Joe Romm tear apart some of the more subtle Brooks fallacies.)
From a practical perspective, green technology is succeeding in part because we have oil prices that are stuck near $100/barrel, and water challenges that are creating deep competition between agriculture and oil and gas in places like Colorado. At some point Brooks and others will also have to acknowledge what the U.S. military, particularly the Navy, has already determined: future conflicts will arise over resources like oil and water; climate change is a security threat; and pursuing a renewable energy future is a safe, logical path.
In the end, fact-free attacks on all things green need to stop. Like in all industries, some paths are profitable and some are not. But we’ll only find out what works if we invest in new growth sectors and not act like the sky is falling — or that there’s some devious green investing cabal secretly making money — when some companies fail. Sad business stories become happy ones through persistence and overcoming failure. Not understanding that is Brooks’ greatest fantasy.
(This post first appeared at Harvard Business Online.)
(Sign up for Andrew Winston’s blog, via RSS feed, or by email. Follow Andrew on Twitter @AndrewWinston)
