Peter Thiel had a good analogy in his talk at Singularity Summit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrUea0gLlY#t=34m0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrUea0gLlY#

Peter Thiel had a good analogy in his talk at Singularity Summit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrUea0gLlY#t=34m0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrUea0gLlY#t=34m0s As with technology, you have to be able to do more with less. Alternative energy has to be cheaper. And until it is cheaper, it's going to be very hard to get it to work. If you had Amazon as a computer company- if you had said in '96, "Yeah it's gonna cost twice as much to buy a book and it'll take you 6 months to get it, but we're going to get subsidies that are really big and that will make the business work and that's why you should invest." That would be quite difficult to work. Cleaner energy sources will take off eventually, but not until they're economically competitive with coal.