Last year, I said that a time would come when the term "green" would fall into disuse. I'm now wondering if that time is nearer than I originally thought. I'm already sensing some fatigue from friends in the media. At the consumer level it's also more pronounced (depending on the day, search for "green fatigue" on a leading search engine bring back 500,000 to over 1 million results). Ironically, at the recently concluded Fortune Brainstorm: Green event, Andrew Shapiro of Green Order said that it felt as if 2008 would be the "apex of green". Which of course begs the question: How steep is the downward slope in 2009? Ted Nordhaus (who coincidentally was my childhood neighbor growing up in the southeast quadrant of Washington, DC, back when we both had hair) and his cohort Michael Shellenberger, in 2004 shook up the establishment with their paper called "Death of Environmentalism". They succeeded in pounding the final nail in that coffin. Now green's utility is in question and it is even being challenged by another color – "blue". Sustainability advocate Adam Werbach is now selling blue as the next step beyond green, arguing that blue is more accessible because it, in effect, means having your cake and eating it too (I've tried that, by the way, and I keep biting my hand by mistake). But really, green or blue, aren't we just creating another arbitrary label that will also fade away with time? Aren't we just setting ourselves up for "blue fatigue", when the next Adam Werbach comes along and pronounces the blue movement dead, and argues that its time for chartreuse to have a turn? Not to mention the fact that people in the developing world (I spent 16 consecutive years in China from 1987-2003 so I have some credibility) have just started the Long March to consumerism and couldn't really give a damn about green or blue, unless its related to the color of their new car or the tile in their newly renovated, air-conditioned kitchen.  

I moved into technology because public capital markets (and human activity more generally) are driven by short-term interest and unsustainable growth. Facing a powerful system backed by powerful inertia, it was my conclusion that fundamental change to our behavior around consumption/growth is highly unlikely to happen (to the degree or within the timeframe needed) to address the ecological problems we face. That POV was largely informed by my time in China, where I watched stock markets open, bans on advertising lifted, private cars allowed back on the roads and consumerism return with a vengeance. I witnessed China's boom and how it raised a lot of people out of poverty. The problem is that we can't raise the remaining 1 billion Chinese out of poverty without totally screwing ourselves and the ecology. And China is just the start – Brazil, India and the rest of the developing world are going through the same transformation. Far be it for me to deny others the chance to live lives of comfort. But it is highly naïve to assume that individual Chinese or Indians or Brazilians will have the foresight to look beyond their drive to material comfort and make decisions on how they live based on a moral responsibility for the health of the planet. The West didn't. It just won't happen (no offense Bill McKibben, whose conclusion for our generation – that more is not better – ignores the fact that its mainly people who know wealth who have room to think about less). Only when people are so afraid of the ramifications of climate change or toxic sludge seeping out of their water taps will they be motivated to change behavior (as recent events in Juneau underscored). But of course, by then it will be too late.  

So my bet for overcoming the challenges is technology, broadly defined. The way I see it, technology is the layer buffering natural resources from consumer and corporate behavior. It allows consumers to continue to behave much as they do and it allows natural resources to get a reprieve from that behavior. The more scaleable the technology, the bigger the reprieve and the better our chances. What Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has done with appliance standards in China is a perfect example of this. "Technology buffering" is not a panacea, but at least there is an opportunity to insert new clean technologies into existing products and systems and have a significant and accelerated impact. That's what gets me moving in the morning. (Several new books, The Cleantech Revolution, The Plot to Save the Planet and Apollo's Fire address this movement). 

What interests me from the Fortune event and others that I've attended over the past two years is a shift in the conversation. Many of the people I talk to say green/blue doesn't really matter. I agree. What matters is that "industrial restructuring" takes place. Whether the CEO of Stonyfield Farm ("we don't even use green to describe our customers, but 'quality' or 'educated'"), the chairman of SC Johnson ("we need to move the conversation from going green to transforming industry"), Vinod Khosla ("people's view of green is obsolete, its about mainstream business"), or builder Steve Glenn ("within 15 years green building goes away as a category"), the focus is more and more on creating a technological buffer to reshape the way we supply and demand.  

So let's focus on the technology that is going to get rid of the only color that deserves our attention – the black of oil and coal.

Hundreds of leaders from business, policy and NGOs in the same room for two days, naturally some interesting things will emerge. Below is a quick sketch of trends and comments from the just wrapped Fortune Brainstorm Green that I thought of particular note:

• The media "needs to get off cars and on to buildings" – Autodesk executive chairman Carol Bartz on the fact that the issue of buildings sucking energy, material and water is still not getting the attention it deserves. The numbers back her up. Conversely, it was noted by others in the green building space like Hycrete and Serious Materials that after a two decade hiatus, venture funding has found its way back to building in the past 2 years.
• A new version of LEED is set for unveil at Greenbuild in Boston and will be a "quantum leap" – head of USGBC Rick Fedrizzi
• Seems to be growing unease, and even skepticism, that cap and trade is going to be as easy at many thought. 2011 was heard repeatedly as a possible timeframe for legislation. Will a nascent business consensus fray into a mess? Are the economics fully understood to push forward aggressively? Is the Hill ready? Anecdotally at least, the answer is still clearly in the balance. One interesting alternative presented was Cap and Dividend.
• Like building, energy efficiency is still struggling to get more than a lot of lip service. Is recession the catalyst for cracking that nut? It was mentioned as a possibility.
• Hybrids and small cars are the fastest growing segment of US automotive market, according to Beth Lowery of GM. "The price of fuel is driving behavior," she said.
• "Living building" that taps into biomimicry is going mainstream. HOK – the giant architecture and design firm is starting to position itself as "bio-inspired", according to Janine Benyus, the founder of the Biomimicry Guild. Benyus' group is also looking to launch Asknature.org – a cool idea that allows anyone to query a database with questions about how nature addresses specific issues.
• Coke's environmental guru Jeff Seabright said look for something soon about consumer-facing information about "water used" in the company's products. It may not be on-package information, but something is coming. This would be welcome, since embedded water in consumer products is still very opaque to the consumer (for example, according to Dow Chemicals' Scott Noesen, it takes 2,000 liters of water to make a McDonald's hamburger if you do the whole-cost analysis.) There is nutritional information, now carbon labeling information has appeared, and water is the logical next step. Let's hope it happens.
• Vinod Khosla was the most provocative in my opinion during a 1:1 with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky. Highlights include:
  • Next generation batteries are not on a rapidly declining cost curve and require a quantum jump with a high probability of failure
  • The "Prius is more greenwash than green"
  • Technology for clean energy will only succeed if it passes the Chindia price test. If it's affordable in China and India then it has a shot.
  • Carbon emissions from all-electric cars are 3x more than that of cars powered by cellulosic ethanol.
• The highest correlation in the movement of solar stocks is the price of oil (not the price of natural gas as would be expected) – David Edwards, analyst at Morgan Stanley
• Both Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant and Khosla cited the same statistics placing biofuel as the fourth leading cause for the spike in global grain prices. The top three – rise in oil prices, drought in Australia and change in eating habits in developing countries like China (to more meat). I found one paper on Khosla's site about Fuel vs. Food, but it didn't appear to include the above list. Anyone know where it comes from?
• When Fortune's Marc Gunther asked a panel of Xerox, GM, SC Johnson and Dupont executives what grade corporate America should get in addressing environmental challenges (10 being the best grade), all of them said "1″, with the exception of GM's Lowery, who gave a "2″ because of innovation happening around new technologies. If you want to actually score a company, you can thanks to the CEO of Stonyfield Farm Gary Hirshberg, who has created an online corporate scorecard at Climatecounts.org

The spectrum of cleantech media continued to fill out this week, following earlier news about the Wall Street Journal , Earth2Tech, and other media.. Green Options, a popular online media group focused on making green more accessible to people, went public this week with CleanTechnica. Sarah Lozanova, the editor of the new blog, said she and her core team of 5-6 writers hope to tell the stories behind green technology and renewable energy instead of just reporting on them. "A lot of content on other sites is above peoples' heads," Sarah told me, adding that CleanTechnica wants to make cleantech "more accessible to a wider audience – to the green curious audience – so it's approachable." The blog will initially look to post at least one story per day, and is open to outside contributors, who can provide "different perspectives, experiences and exposures". Sarah also said they hoped to do a lot of Q&As.

The Wall Street Journal launched a free business-meets-green blog called Environmental Capital. The blog's editor is Jeff Ball. The lead writer is Keith Johnson, who just moved back to the US from 12 years in Spain. The blog addresses the convergence of business and environment. It will include energy, water – anything that addresses how businesses are dealing with the new energy/environment paradigm. They expect to have 4-5 posts per day, and hope to differentiate from other similar media/blogs by taking a step back, highlighting trends and connecting the dots. If they deliver on that promise, it will fill a nice gap.

When first conceived, this was intended to be a new franchise like the D event Walt Mossberg does except focused on green. As part of that concept, the WSJ will also be holding its first ECO:nomics conference this year in March. I will be interested to see how that is different from the Brainstorm Green event planned by Fortune.

It was inevitable. Cleantech as a category is so gigantic that no one could possibly be an expert in everything. So its gratifying to see the market start to mature and various players start to narrow their focus. This is certainly true in the VC world. XPV Capital, for example, is a firm that is focused exclusively on water. Smart, when you realize that according to Booz Allen, $40 trillion will have to be spent on urban infrastructure over the next 25 years, with much of that headed to water. One Earth Capital is focusing on agriculture and distributed energy. Clean-ag also gets too little attention, so good to see someone raising their hand. Many others are also honing their thesis into one or two areas. But even those areas seem daunting in scope, and I wouldn't be surprised to see further layers being added as focus narrows even more. Media seems to be moving in that direction too – you now see Biofuels Digest and many others. Events as well are starting to diversify and get more specific. I'm personally far less interested in the broader events at this point, which seem to have the usual suspects in attendance and are more about being seen than being heard. Apparently I am not the only one who feels that way. I was recently contacted by a friend who now pretty much passes on the general Cleantech events. He is headed to Concentrated Solar Power Summit US instead. Another new CSP event is also happening in Europe a month later. Makes sense, and there is specialization happening in other areas under the Cleantech umbrella. Why would the CEO of Verdiem, an energy efficiency play involving PC power management (and client), want to go to a conference to hear about biofuels and coal-bed methane? (Rhetorical question).

In honor of Blog Action Day – aka BAD – I'm guessing that a lot the posts will be pretty depressing or somewhat sanctimonious, so I chose to explore the humor and absurdity of our eco-existential angst. What better way to represent that than a personal "Best of" list of environmental comedy – could there be anything more absurd than laughing at our self-destruction by using an overused cliché formulation? So I scrounged together some nuggets over the weekend while juggling two kids and my carbon footprint, and came up with random candidates in the categories of website/blog, novel, film and video/TV (English-language only for now). I was inspired by David Roberts' knock knock entry and the responses on Grist from 2005. Happily, Grist seems to finally be attracting some mainstream company in poking fun at our planetary predicament. Witness Comedy Central's recently launched  Address the Mess (the environmental best of Stewart, Colbert, South Park, etc), the first annual Environmental Comedy Festival that took place in Seattle this year or Earth to America on TBS. If you buy into the 5 Stages of Climate Grief outlined by Steve Running (one of the authors of the Nobel peace prize winning IPCC report), then comedy probably falls somewhere between depression and acceptance, which is a pretty good breeding ground for producing some twisted stuff. So here they are:  

Web/Blog

• Grist – the Onion of environmental humor, Grist is the king of the hill without a doubt.
• Cheat Neutral – Infidelity meets carbon. We are after all carbon based creatures. 
• Ideal Bite – "Sassy" is their buzzword, and they deliver. And the ladies who run this green Daily Candy are based in Montana. Need I say more?
• Crap at the Environment – Just for the title alone, this one gets a nod, although I have no idea what it does or if its funny.

Video/TV

• Will Farrell doing "W" doing Global Warming – this is almost as good as waste-to-fuel.
• History of Oil Propaganda by Plenty TV – the video version of Toxic Sludge is Good for You. How gullible are we?
• Store Wars – floating produce is hard to ignore.
• Green Pieces: an Eco-Comedy – good reviews on this Canadian offering, but I couldn't find a copy.
• The Meatrix – the While Rabbit meets red meat.

Film

• Blue Vinyl, a documentary by my friend Judith Helfand, maker of what she calls the Toxic Comedy. Who knew PVC could be so deathly funny?
• I Heart Huckabees – if a movie is shown in a theater, but no one is there to see it, is it still funny? Good question. I haven't seen this movie, but I think the answer is yes.
• Toxic Avenger – arguably the poster child of environmental misfits, Lloyd Kaufman's creation is so bad its good.

Novels

• This Other Eden, by Ben Elton, this is a surprisingly insightful (it came out in 1993), and frighteningly funny novel from the British stand-up comedian. Plastic Tolstoy and Jurgen Thor are characters to die for. Stark and Gridlock are other Elton works along similar lines.
• The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, this is a bit dated (1975), but its still one of the funnier treatments of the environmental movement

Best Performance by a Family Member

Disposable Backpack – my cousin Nick made this at college. I couldn't resist.

As a follow on to my last post on cleantech media, GigaOM has also entered the fray with a new blog called Earth2Tech. Fellow Red Herring alumnae Katie Fehrenbacher and Adena DeMonte will be running the show at Earth2Tech. In discussion for more than half a year, Earth2Tech will move beyond the telecom, broadband world that GigaOM has traditionally plied, and look at the world of solar, biofuel, fuel cells, water etc. In a call with Katie, who is the blog's editor, she talked about "trying to fill the void" that exists between cleantech entrepreneurs, venture and technology. "You see a lot of consumer green blogs, where you can learn about how to cut down your carbon footprint, but not a lot of aggressive, cleantech business coverage," she said. To begin with, she expects about 7 posts a day, with a minimum 2 being original features. The other stuff will be more blog post style, aggregating commentary and news. Katie echoed a sentiment felt by many working in the cleantech space – that it is frickin' HUGE (my words). So she and Adena will be focused on "what's local and what's hot" in Silicon Valley, and not so much on what the big multinationals are doing, since "its more difficult to pry information from them". There will also be a regular post on cleantech related eco-web tools (such as a GPS tool that finds the nearest e85), as well as the occasional lifestyle piece by other bloggers such as Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee.

Lux Research did a quick and dirty Factiva search of media articles since 1996 using four keywords – "cleantech", "greentech", "clean technology" and "green technology" – and found a surge in 2005-2006. No surprise there. They calculated a 70% per year growth in press coverage of cleantech since 2004, with total articles in major publications numbering almost 3,500 last year. Lux's observation comes at a time when, also not surprisingly, new cleantech media and analyst outlets are popping up all over. Of course there are some of the more well-known ones – Inside Greentech, Renewable Energy Access, GreenBiz … but there are also many others coming on line. Greener World Media, Joel Makower's group which publishes GreenBiz, has expanded out with GreenerComputing and ClimateBiz among others; Cleantech Investor has appeared in the UK and Dow Jones is set to launch a Clean Technology Investor newsletter. Other traditional media like BusinessWeek, Business 2.0 (GreenWombat) and Red Herring are also increasing their coverage of the space, while CNET is dedicating more resources as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see something from the Wall Street Journal this year. The blogosphere is also sizzling with activity and new entrants (including mine), but I won't get into that here. On the analyst side, Greentech Media is about to launch a service, while Lux has taken its previous focus on nanotech and made it part of the broader cleantech umbrella (it just issued its first comprehensive market report on cleantech).