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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (74846)	7/31/2006 7:02:46 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 362340

Long and interesting discussion on the Oil Drum. This guy, Vinod Khosla (Indian American venture capitalist who is considered one of the most successful and influential personalities in Silicon Valley. He was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and became a general partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1986. In 2004 he formed Khosla Ventures,) has gotten off big into ethanol. Got challenged to debate the issue with the big alcohol expert at TOD, ended up talking on the phone for about 90 minutes yesterday. theoildrum.com Areas of Agreement and Disagreement We agreed on the following issues: Current energy policy needs a dramatic facelift A carbon tax is a good idea Brazil is much more efficient at making ethanol than the U.S., and the ethanol tariffs should be lifted Butanol may be a superior choice to ethanol Grain ethanol subsidies should be eliminated There is great potential in researching energy storage devices (e.g. batteries) We disagreed on the following issues: The issues surrounding corn ethanol aren't significant since it will be a transitory solution The solution must fit in today's engines Bashing oil companies is acceptable to achieve a political goal Renewable electricity can't compete with coal Cellulosic is scalable within the next 5 years The consequences of failure to deliver can be very high Food versus fuel will be a serious issue going forward Conclusions I already had a pretty good understanding of where he was coming from, but I have tried to accurately relay his position so that others may understand. This is the least I owe him after he spent that much time talking with me. However, we still have some fundamental areas of disagreement, and my impression is that he is concerned about Peak Oil, but not in the way I am concerned. My worry is that over-promising on cellulosic ethanol will prevent us from getting very serious about taking the steps we need to take as a society toward powering down while we still have some choices. I think we need to fund cellulosic ethanol, but until there are a few pilot plants operating, we just don't know if it will be feasible on a commercial scale. I did have difficulty convincing him that corn ethanol is a bad thing, because his position is that it is merely a jumping off point to something much bigger. He said he wouldn't be investing in cellulosic if we weren't producing several billion gallons of corn ethanol. He said that corn ethanol is "priming the pump", and has shown the feasibility of ethanol as fuel in the U.S.