Don’t worry about oil

Don’t worry about oil. With oil and gas prices at all time highs, that seems a strange thing to say. Yet, we really shouldn’t worry. Solutions are available and well under way.

Around 1880, visionaries in Paris painted a bleak picture of the future. If our city continues to grow at this rate, they argued, carriages couldn’t ride our avenues anymore in the near future. They will be stuck in mounts of horseshit. The respected elders of their times didn’t see that the solution to the problem was already coming. Henry Ford was about to introduce the automobile to the world.

Today’s media are full of contemporaries of these Parisian visionaries. We read about peak oil and about the disasters waiting to happen when the last drop of fuel hits the pump. Even the nuclear industry sees an opportunity for a come back for unneccesarily dangerous power plants.

In the meantime, profound change is coming from another direction. Do you remember when you first bought your first cell phone? I bought mine in 1997. In the past decade the cell phone industry has completely transformed society. It’s hard to even think about that world without cell phones of not so long ago. Society has been decentralized. People work from home or from wherever they are.

And nobody saw coming what came. All the great technological revolutions happen much more quickly than even the experts and enthusiasts predict. The forecasts for the spread of mobile phones and information technology were all overtaken by reality. And exactly the same is going to happen–is already happening–with the upcoming renewable energy economy.

As we speak, in the same Silicon Valley that launched the IT revolution, many venture capital firms are funding dozens and dozens of startups that are going to deliver the clean renewable energy of the future. These venture capitalists are driven by the one motivation that they all understand: To make money. Clean green tech is going to be bigger than the Internet, they know. John Doerr of one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Kleiner Perkins, estimates that the global energy business is worth 6 trillion dollars per year. No other technology market even comes close. As Doerr has said: “Energy is the mother of all markets.”

Last year Silicon Valley invested 1.1 billion dollars in clean energy technology. That was almost 100 percent more than in 2006. That’s the rate of growth that built the Internet boom. That’s the rate of growth that will transform society once more. Venture capitalists see opportunities to reach the ultimate goal–energy that is cheaper and cleaner than coal or gas–in just a few years. Why? Because that’s the timeframe they need to give a real good return to their investors.

But wait a minute. Didn’t that nice Internet boom end in a painful disaster in 2000 when many many people lost a lot of money? Yes it did. But despite their losses, the foundations for the digital infrastructure that is driving today’s world economy had been laid. Our wealth today was substantially made by the Internet boom.

Investment booms–and busts–have changed the world ever since the tulip mania in The Netherlands in the 1630s. In the 19th century, many people made and lost a lot of money in building the railways that provided the necessary infrastructure for the subsequent industrial revolution.

Exactly the same thing is going to happen again. We will see astonishing investments and growth in clean tech in the months and years ahead. And, yes, there will be a likely bust in the end. But by then the world of oil will be a thing of the past. As an inspiring T-shirt says: “40 years of oil left. 5,500,000,000 years of sunshine left.” Don’t worry.