The silicon valley support for green/clean energy goes beyond rationality. They were investing based on faith (or hoping for bigger government intervention) and got burned.
I think clean energy enthusiasm is rational. The scientific consensus is that emissions are warming the planet, which will have large, undesirable effects. A rational response to that is to limit emissions. We haven't done so, which seems like the irrational link in the causality chain here.
There a lot of reasons Kleiner was foolish without even touching the global warming debate. $100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global warming. There is cheap abundant politically connected dirty energy. There is abundant clean cheap natural gas. Even people who believe that global warming will have large undesirable effects aren't necessarily willing to spend more money to do something about it. It isn't necessarily rational to bet on people behaving rationally.
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edit: I am not arguing against electric cars, especially cheap ones. But fancy Fisker $100k electric cars were rich people's vanity toys, not global warming solutions.
Solution or not "Fisker" was a bad investment. Their strategy from the start they was doomed to fail. Relying on outsourced IP in a new technology isnt something I would invest in.
$100k electric sport cars aren't a real solution to global warming.
Of course they are! With electric cars, it doesn't transmits carbon, plus it can get cheaper energy from the grid. Of course, coal plants are still dirty, but they are more efficient than using gasoline in ICE, and ICE only converts like 30% to forward motion.
All that is left is to improve and drive the cost of solar panels into the ground until they are competitive with oil and coal.
I haven't seen a good analysis of gas (from the ground) to ICE in mpg, vs. electricity from coal (in the ground) with grid losses and batteries, with the capital costs of the vehicles amortized. I'm not sure what the best comparison is -- dollars, kilos of CO2, other emissions, etc.?
Obviously the US grid isn't even 100% coal, and we're presumably moving toward more and more NG and renewables at all times, but it would be interesting to quantify this over time.
So is this to imply that we should stop doing things that benefit the planet and the human species if we believe it will have a negative economic impact? Obviously I'm not arguing KP should be the ones doing this, but your point seems to imply that these actions are only rational if the market supports them and you make a profit.
I said it's a rational policy response. But it's not a rational market response in the current environment. KP is a market actor that was betting on the viability of that market. So far it's not working.
There are other ways and means to effect change besides the marketplace. I never said anything about stopping "doing things that benefit the planet."
Kleiner's investments were in solar panels and lithium ion battery powered cars that were at best small improvements on old technologie that weren't efficient enough. If someone has a fusion reactor coming online, invest in that instead.
The funny thing is, growing up in silicon valley, I always understood it to be a locus of green/clean movements. Yet when I moved out of the state, on my trip to the mountain region I saw more renewable energy harvesting over the course of twenty hours than I did in twenty years in the silicon valley.
This left me with the impression, deserved or not, that the bay area is big on making headlines about green/clean energy, but not nearly as interested in actually producing significant amounts of green/clean energy.
