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May 17, 2007

Last notes on the Clean Energy Summit

I made a couple more posts on the Clean Energy Venture Summit this week, at Worldchanging and at the Supernova Conversation Hub. The conference closed with a discussion featuring Matt Nordan of Lux Research and Bruce Sterling, who said the emerging new clean energy industry has "a hard row to hoe – you have to get your head around this kind of immediate, fast transition. Success is not an accident coming from a place that likes to keep itself weird." 418 people attended the conference, all excited to be sniffing the foundation of a new business paradigm, though Bruce made the great point that it's not really so much as a business shift as a global cultural change. The conference was all about business, research and development, science and technology – but all these are driven (and constrained) by culture. (Not only that - I'm looking for a clean energy conference that focuses on policy, on the legal and regulatory environment and how it needs to change in order for the best-case possibilities to manifest. Bruce and Jasmina joined David Armistead, David Swedlow, Josh Parker and I after the conference ended to talk more from a cultural angle. Bruce asked a question that we all took seriously: What would it take to bring every green pundit in the world into Austin? Bruce called this idea the "Buckminster Memorial Big Brain Superdome."

(Photo: Bruce and Matt Nordan talk... "the science and science fiction of clean energy.")

jon posted this at 11:07 AM
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