Silicon Valley entrepeneur Rodgers develops solar, believes in peak oil
Original: Sun Total
Najeeb Hasan, San Jose Metroactive
Controversial Silicon Valley maverick T.J. Rodgers is suddenly high tech's biggest champion of alternative energy. Does it matter that he's ultimately in it for the money? Or that he can't stand environmentalists? He certainly doesn't think so.
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...Rodgers is one of those rare Silicon Valley entrepreneurs colorful enough to make the jump from the obscure dreariness of the valley's business pages. He was dubbed "one of America's toughest bosses" by Fortune. And there was the infamous incident in which Rodgers publicly and unapologetically skewered a nun who demanded he include more women and minorities on the board of Cypress Semiconductor, the company he's run since 1982.
He made waves again when he called the federal government's post-9/11 curtailment of civil liberties a bigger threat to America's freedom than any threat "posed by Al-Qaida" in the op-ed pages of the Mercury News. He's also courted controversy with his public criticism of hobnobbing with government officials to win tech subsidies, and his still-ongoing feud with residents in La Honda about a vineyard he's building on the region's hilly terrain.
But these days, Rodgers is raising eyebrows with his foray into alternative energy, namely solar power.
...Rodgers, now at the helm of a company that is widely considered to produce the highest efficiency solar cells in the world, is not ultimately motivated by the same green impulse that drives pushers of solar as an alternative energy. He's unabashedly in it for the money.
Rodgers responds that being in it for the money is ultimately also being in it for the greater good. And Silicon Valley's King of Solar could care less what the global warming crowd says to do about the environment
...This is not to say that Rodgers doesn't accept the fact that resources dwindle. In fact, he's a big believer in what's known as Peak Oil theory. The theory, put forth by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil consultant in the 1950s, predicted that the world's oil production would peak in 2000 and then fall. Hubbert also correctly predicted that domestic oil production would peak at about 1970. Rodgers thinks that Hubbert may be off on world oil production by a few years (many Peak Oil theory advocates now say production will peak in 2010), but he is still right that it will peak. What Rodgers doesn't buy is the vision of the movement's main current spokesman, Richard Heinberg, a faculty member of the New College of California in San Francisco, who envisions catastrophic consequences for humanity-picture a devolution to agrarian lifestyles and vicious resource wars-once oil production peaks.
"No, I'm not concerned about some great catastrophe," Rodgers sneers.
Rodgers explains what he sees as a pattern: "They develop a theory, they write themselves a little paperback book, they develop a following, and then they preach and then they want what is, in effect, political power, which means, in effect, the right to order people what to do," he says. "So, no, I react very hostilely toward the moral mandate. Who the hell has the right to tell me what the moral mandate is? To me, the highest moral mandate is that I am making a product, solar cells, that people want, and I sell it to them to make a profit for my shareholders. That's moral, that's right. But the concept that I'm working on some greater good-I am working on the greater good."
(Aug 30 - Sep 5 2006 issue)http://www.metroactive.com/metro/08.30.06/tj-rodgers-0635.html |
