Mygreenwheels

"A global response to climate change will spur a business revolution bigger than the Internet". Thus spake one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, at the Cleantech investor conference in Frankfurt. Like many of the Silicon Valley brotherhood he makes a lot more sense talking about the way technology is going than those old dinosaurs in Detroit. And now Joy is a partner at a firm of venture capital investors, so I guess he's got lots of smart people taking his advice.

The way he sees it, climate change will spur innovation and Silicon Valley is well placed to benefit. "Solar cells are semiconductors, heat to electricity is semiconductors, software to manage systems comes out of Silicon Valley," he says in this Reuters item. Research into safer rechargeable li-ion batteries is happening mainly in the US and Canada while innovation in small electric cars is mostly centred in Europe and Asia.

There's big money to be made from climate change, but big money to be lost too, so why don't the Motown boys wake up before it's too late? As Joy says "They lobbied Washington against innovation. The industry is now really in trouble, the car companies didn't innovate. Everyone's basically driving a truck."

Are the big guys going to wait for someone like TH!NK to do all the EV product development for them in the hope that they can snap'em up further down the line? I'd say that's a risky strategy for Ford and GM. They're liable to find that the billionaire geeks have got there first.