Khosla, Romm Fire Back At '60 Minutes' Cleantech Exposé 117
An anonymous reader writes "CBS recently aired a segment on its 60 Minutes TV newsmagazine critical of what it referred to as the 'Cleantech' industry, i.e. clean energy startups, often founded by Silicon Valley/IT businessmen and engineers. Correspondent Lesley Stahl adapted the familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style when interviewing venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, an investor in biofuel startup KiOR and dozens of other clean energy businesses, then following up with other industry experts who appear to refute Khosla's assertions. Stahl ran down a list of high profile taxpayer-subsidized industry failures and suggests that private investors such as Khosla seem to be losing money as well. Khosla has just responded in the form of an open letter to CBS News which lists allegedly false and inaccurate statements in the 60 Minutes program, while pointing out that the fossil fuels industry is also heavily subsidized by government. Khosla, a longtime general partner at Kleiner Perkins before starting his own firm, was one of four Stanford graduate students who co-founded Sun Microsystems in the early 1980s. Physicist and climate blogger Joseph Romm posted a response to what he referred to as the '60 Minutes hit job on clean energy' last week; other environmentalists have also weighed in."
Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style" (Score:5, Informative)
Why be surprised at it, after all it's the same network that has or had Maddow, Mathews, and Olbermann on it and they've always had their faces stuck to the ass of the democratic party.
60 Minutes is a CBS thing. Maddow and Mathews work for NBC, and Olbermann used to work there as well. (He currently hosts a sports show on Disney/ABC-owned ESPN.)
Your larger point (about how all the networks openly support the Democrats) is spot on, but a better example of CBS's malpractice was Rather using forged documents to claim that George W. Bush didn't really serve in the National Guard.
Global warming denial campaign (Score:3, Informative)
Paid "news", funded by the oil+coal guys.
Coal+oil companies are on a disinformation campaign about traffic, pollution, accidents, global warming, economic costs, and a host of crazy, irrational arguments. Their common conclusion "pollution and waste is the better alternative"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil#Funding_of_global_warming_disinformation_and_denial [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers#Fossil_fuel_and_chemical_industry_lobbying [wikipedia.org]
Re:Alter reading some comments, I would like to po (Score:5, Informative)
5) Even so, maybe some of the cleantech projects will ultimately succeed and gave back so many benefits that covers all the failures we see now (that is one of the opinions from Khosla), but I find the right now doubtful. Even the company many cite as successful (Tesla), is right now just a company that makes expensive luxury cars to enormously wealthy people (of course that can chang in the future, but it is so right now), if that is the best outcome of so many public money invested, the results are really bad.
I don't have time right now to address the other issues you've pointed out, but I feel the need to point out that you're wrong about Tesla. As a 2010 post on non-other than slashdot references, Tesla makes the drivetrain for the RAV4EV [slashdot.org], which ends up being about a $20k premium over the equivalent, gasoline based RAV4. Additionally, Tesla has paid off their subsidized loans early [slashdot.org]. In even more recent news, Musk was on CNN's New Day in a a prerecorded interview this morning commenting on how they're working on a new car that's going to be more reasonably priced (about 1/2 the price of the Model S) to be released in about 3 years.
Frankly, if it takes a company 13 years to go from no product, to 5 years later an extremely high end, only the super rich can afford situation to a situation, that's fine, then 8 years later they're at hey, an upper middle class, or even middle class individual can afford their vehicle, I'd consider that reasonable. Especially if they decided that it was more important to pay off their debts first.