The comments on the "Don't Blame the Feds if Silicon Valley Falls Behind" are, by and large, excellent.
I was especially intrigued by one writer, bbulkow, who suggest that Silicon Valley isn't set up to do green power because "we don't do chemistry."
An excerpt:
What I do hear is that Silicon Valley might not be the right time and place for "green". We don't do chemistry. You can't set up a lab for chemical research -- permits. You can't buy chemicals easily -- there's no Fry's for a research chemist who wants to strike out on his own. Federal restrictions are onerous.
We have pieces of the puzzle -- silicon, genes, software, and capital -- but we don't have chemistry. For a friend working on a bio-fuel company, it's chemistry and genetics from Berkeley, huge pools of sludge in Mexico, capital from Menlo Park.
No Fry's for chemists?
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