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Utility of the Green Energy Bubble

From the perspective of this BBC article, a clean energy boom is already well under way. Even the UK, with our apparently doddering government, was 3rd in the world for renewable investment (in 2009), not far behind the US in gross expenditure. Way out in the lead, in terms of investment, and soon installed capacity, is China. Yes, the nation getting the most international evils for it's ballooning coal addiction, will soon pass it's 2020 target of 30GW of renewables (when counting just its wind power), and it is the world leader in photovoltaic cell production.

While US investment fell 40% during the sub-prime mortgage crash, overall global investment has been buoyant. South Korea's capacity grew 250% in the last 5 years!

Greenpeace may be moaning about data center power use , but Google are already heavily reducing their carbon footprint , spurring the rest of the industry, and society as a whole to follow suit. Their roves are carpeted with solar PV and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI circa 2007) they co-founded has pretty ambitious targets.

I think the economic boom/bust cycle mirrors nature: species explosion and mass extinctions. A new ecological niche opens up, so bountiful that it allows every variation of weird and wonderful creature, however implausible, to flourish for a time. Then circumstances change, times get harder, killing off all but those most intimately suited to the niche's requirements.

The 'dot com' boom , that fledged the Google generation, funded anything and everything to do with Internet businesses. Because of this mania we can be fairly sure that no great idea was passed over because of market skepticism. And no one was directly killed in the mania, unlike the great aviation bubble: Freeman Dyson refers, in Chapter One of "Imagined Worlds" (1997), to Nevil Shute Norway's autobiography "Slide Rule":

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