The real stupidity we’ll see develop is in what is being called Green Tech or Clean Tech. One of the biggest “almost stories” I had this year was a buddy of mine who works at the EPA. I never got the official documentation I was promised (which is why you never saw it written up here), but the oral recitiation of the story I got from several insiders had to do with several major industry leaders from the technology sector sitting down with EPA officials and working out the standards for what constitutes “Clean Technology” in a data center.

One of the industry leaders involved also is a company with two letters in their initials that also happens to own a TV network – a TV network that was promoting something called “Green Week” on all their shows (this was just prior to the WGA strike). My buddy at the EPA though told me that of all the industry leaders at the negotiation table, their data centers were the worst offenders.

Of course, where there is a percieved problem, there will be hundreds of entreprenuers with supposed solutions to these problems, all of them with their hands out to VCs. Since environmentalism is more of a sham art than science for most so-called researchers in the field, most solutions to the environmental problem will not really solve anything, and be huge resource-sinks to the economy.

It sounds like I have an ultra-dim view of environmentalism. I’m not the type of guy who lives under a rock and believes that we can do what we will to our planet and expect no repercussions. Unfortunately, many of the problems that clean tech aims to fix either do not exist, or have been greatly exaggerated by researchers inflating their findings in an attempt to maintain their grant money.

This will adversely affect not only Web 2.0, but all other scientific ventures wanting to become technology, since private funding dollars will be diverted to these hammers in search of nails. As such, given the almost certain flow of VC dollars into these pseudo-sciences, we’ll see a slight slowdown for investment into social and Web 2.0 style projects.

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taken from here.

further exposition.