THE CARBON WAR

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The Winning of The Carbon War
is expected to hit the coast at Category 5, with 200 mph winds. Hurricane
Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people, was a Category 3 storm when
it reached landfall.
A record 22 storms of Category 4 and 5 have formed across the Northern
Hemisphere this year. The previous record was 18, set in 1997 and equalled
in 2004.
A weekend living in luxury where the venture capitalists live. I stay in the wonderful
hillside home of Stephan Dolezalek, looking out across a wooded valley
with occasional neighbouring luxury homes tucked in the trees. Stephan and
I spend hours talking about the state of the world. He is moving on from Vantage
Point Capital Partners, forming a new fund that he is calling Resourcient. Bruising
as his experience has been in the first phase of clean-energy investing, he
feels confident that the next phase is going to be different. The fundamentals,
as the analysts like to say, are stronger than they have ever been. Stated another
way, what other choice is the world going to have now but to invest trillions of
dollars in clean energy, instead of fossil fuels?
Stephan has a metaphor for the state of play. The captains of the energy
incumbency, and their investors, sit in deckchairs on the luxury ocean liner,
smoking big cigars, looking at the tiny lifeboats bobbing in the freezing waters
below them. Why would anyone jump into one of those, they ask each other,
observing that some people have taken the leap.
But that nasty noise they heard a while ago should be persuading them
to do otherwise, if they would but appreciate what it meant. Their ship has hit
an iceberg, and it is sinking.
Dinner in another luxury home, this time looking out across the ocean at
Pacifica, not with an investor but the other side of the equation: a successful
entrepreneur. Dan Shugar and I go back to the mid 1990s. He co-founded
a solar installation company, Powerlight, the world leader of its day in solar
installation. I was on the board of the first private equity fund investing solely
in renewables. We invested in Powerlight.
Powerlight was different from Solarcentury. They were plastering flat roofs
of commercial buildings in sunny California with hundreds of kilowatts of
solar while we had barely got off the ground with our smaller and more varied
installations on homes and commercial buildings under cloudy British skies.