Is The Environment the New Religion?

During an interesting chat with my wife this morning, she mentioned a letter in the Smithsonian Magazine in which the writer pointed out that the "sky is falling" environmentalists share many similarities to those fringe/extremist groups surrounding most mainstream religions who often share an apocalyptic or doomsday view of the future. It is a perspective that has been around for a couple of years, but this is the first time I'd actually taken time to consider it and its implications.

It became clear that, indeed, many of those engaged so passionately in the climate change debate are simply projecting a "new religion", one that may have resulted in the movement away from mainstream religions or the vacuum created in the lives of many neo-atheists (often the most technologically/scientifically focused individuals).

The writer also aptly points out that in 50 years or so, we may well look back on this type of extremism through the same retrospective lens we view other cults and fringe groups of the past. In fact, some environmental groups have even been classified as religious organizations from a legal perspective.

In any case, a stimulating and thought provoking perspective.

For the record, my personal views on the impact of human behavior on climate change are fairly straightforward. I feel that the issue is rather one of sustainability - we cannot continue to "take" from the planet's finite resources. I do not, however, think it is simply a byproduct of our lifestyle, industry, and technology - though there's plenty of room for improvement in those areas. Instead, the single most correlating metric is clearly the growth in the overall population of the planet. Unless we address this issue, everything else is a moot point. That will clearly not be an easy issue to address, as it touches so many hot buttons, so we may need to wait for mother earth (or our own misbehaviors) to correct things for us.

Rant off.

Misguided focus in the tech industry?

I've come to the conclusion that, with some exceptions, our venture capital/tech investing/tech media industries in the United States are broken. As I look at most the so-called "hot startups" that are hyped and featured in the online media, at tech events, and so on, I can't help but notice a few common characteristics:

• Very few of them are tacking any "big" problems. Perhaps this is a side effect of the so-called "lean startup" mentality, but I'd guess it is more a combination of lack of commitment/sticktuitiveness with the ADHD generation (both the entrepreneur and the investor), along with the quick flip mindset on the part of the investors. Ask most of these startups what their five year plan is, and you'll get a blank look. The core value propositions of many of these companies also do NOTHING to create substantial number of jobs, improve our competitive position in the world, help with solving the challenges of a resource constrained world, or in general, to improve peoples' lives.
  
• The vast majority of these so-called "innovative startups" are clones of some existing product, process, or service. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Foursquare should be very flattered. In chatting with some of these startups, if you ask them to differentiate their approach, you'll be presented with a list of relatively shallow and easily reproducable "features", as opposed to something innovative.
  
• A great many of them are focused in and around an advertising and/or media model. Either directly (web or marketing analytics), indirectly (ad-supported revenue model), or peripherally (content creators/providers for sites who will generate revenue via advertising). Ironic, since this is largely a zero-sum game, and overall advertising spend is down nearly 25% from its high water mark in 2007.

To elaborate on that last point, it seems that there is an implicitly incestuous relationship between online tech media (and event promoters) who generally purport to be neutral observers or independently opinionated pundits/visionaries and the success/failure of companies in the ad/media space. Additionally, the fact that these companies require little capital (since they create very little value) and are often acquired within a couple years of founding make for quick hits for investors, long before the "real" value, viability, or staying power of any of these companies is exposed. There are definitely a rare few exceptions that create real value, but those have become increasingly few and far between.

I guess it just pains me to see the country's best and brightest (or the world's best and brightest, for that matter), working on such vacuous and superficial projects, when there are so many more important areas that we could and should be applying their skills, our capital investment, and collective energy towards.

This dangerous trend threatens our long term competitiveness, economic security, and in many ways, our overall security. Think for moment if we had invested $1 trillion in alternative energy sources instead of being forced to place troops in harm's way to protect our petro-crack addiction. Imagine if we had invested more in telemedicine, more cost effective medical devices, and technologies to efficiently and cheaply provide clean water to the world's poor. I'm well aware that these areas *are* getting some investment, but they are not getting their fair share of visibility or attention, due to the incestuous connections outlined above.

Hey, odds are good that I could be completely wrong about the cause and effect, but it is plainly obvious to me that our technology press and pundits are saying way too much about the vanity plays and hollow startups and not enough about "stuff that matters", to paraphrase Tim O'Reilly's call for the nation's entrepreneurs to "work on stuff that matters".

Maybe we as a society, with our two minute attention span, are as much to blame. Maybe it's too much focus on the quarter-to-quarter mindset (which on its own isn't necessarily a bad thing) versus being able to take a multi-year or even multi-generational view. Maybe it's just plain old greed and a willingness to mortgage the future for short term gain. Whatever the reason, I hope we can fix it.

Rant over.

Where was Wall Street?

I find it very interesting to note that the automakers felt compelled to feed at the trough of government handouts (much like the bankers have), yet the investment banks and private equity firms were nowhere to be found when it came to offering financing and restructuring options for the automakers...isn't this precisely what Wall Street is supposed be doing, rather than running the over-leveraged casino they've been running for the past decade or so?

There can be no doubt that we need a vibrant manufacturing industry here in the US, including heavy industry (steel, automotive, industrial equipment). It is a national security and economic survival imperative. That said, the free market should be able to find ways to support, on appropriate terms, the financing of the restructuring of these firms, not the government. I don't wish to live in a country like Russia or Venezuela with nationalized industry. Is this not an ideal opportunity for investors to get an asset below market value given the stressed state of these companies?

In any case, the automakers also have an opportunity to re-tool themselves as innovators for the next 50 years, if they can take a much more aggressive and proactive stance on electric vehicles. The might of their collective R&D capability, along with some targeted public R&D funding for these initiatives and the associated infrastructure that would be needed to support a post-internal-combustion-engine world, should be able to tackle this issue in less than a decade and at a cost much below many would think. Realize that the Apollo Space Program was executed for a shade over $100 billion of today's dollars. It is also imperative that the United States be a net provider of these technologies to the rest of the world, not a consumer. The net/net result of dramatically reducing our oil imports and at the same time increasing exports of US-made or US-designed technologies is compelling. There are simply too many reasons, from national security to long term competitiveness to not pursue this as a major national "quest", much like our efforts to put a man on the moon.