Belief A Green Collar Economy Can Bail Us Out

The Canberra Times has re-published a New York Times ‘aspirational article’ by Tom Friedman who writes about the legacies of several boom and bust bubbles:

• The 19th century American railroad boom and bust – leaving America with a fabulous infrastructure of railroads
• The late 20th century dot-com boom and bust – leaving an internet highway system that helped spearhead the IT revolution
• The early 21st century has seen a boom and now a bust around financial services. What will this legacy be? A pile of empty Florida condos, used private jets that the wealthy can no longer afford and dead derivative contracts that no one can understand? Worse, money for this bubble borrowed from China will have to be paid back with interest and without any lasting benefit

Tom says, yes, we do need the big bail-out BUT he cites Indian-American immigrant
K R Sridhar – founder of Bloom Energy – who says there’s a difference between a surviving mentality and a thriving mentality:

“Infants and the elderly who are disabled obsess about survival…We are thrivers. Thrivers are constantly looking for new opportunities to seize, lead and be No1. That is what America is about. But we have lost focus on that…

Van Jones, president of Green for All, is the author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. This ‘green cure’ for the current financial mess is full of:

“concrete ideas, examples, and policies that could jump start the US economy, repair the earth, and lift millions of people out of poverty.”

In a green economy, we would rely less on credit from foreigners and more on creativity from Americans, argues Van.

About KR Sridhar And Bloom Energy

KR Sridhar is the principal co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, KPCB’s first greentech investment. Bloom Energy develops a flexible fuel cell system that produces clean, reliable and affordable energy from a wide range of fuels. Bloom’s technology enables consumers to generate their own electricity for less than they pay their utility, and to reduce their carbon emissions by 50-100% per kW depending on the fuel.

A vision for our leaders?