So we're toast, right?
I mean, that's pretty much the pervasive global assumption these days: The 19th century belonged to England, the 20th century belonged to America, and the 21st century will belong to China. Tell your kids to study Mandarin.
I'm second to none in worrying about U.S. education and industry meeting the challenge of a rising China and India. But after a year traveling all over America talking to educators and innovators, I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. No, not yet.
You see, my grandma back in Minnesota had a saying that went like this: "Never cede a century to a country that censors Google."
It was just a little thing my grandma had — she never believed that the future would belong to a country that limited its people's ability to discover knowledge. Censoring Google is a proxy for a lot of bad government heavy-handedness and censorship that hinders innovation.
Now it's true that America's two major political parties are lost, and Washington is brain-dead. But precisely because we have this incredibly flexible, open, unrestricted, competitive economy — where we don't censor anything — what you find when visiting U.S. innovation hubs is that no one is waiting for Washington to declare the next big Manhattan Project, for, say, energy independence. American innovators are growing their own.
Not a day goes by now that I don't get a letter from some start-up that wants me to write about how it is turning trash, corn, sugar, coal, manure, hydrogen, waves, wood chips, wind, sunlight or switch grass into power. I recently visited SRI International, near Stanford, where scientists are working on the critical problem of how to get more electric power out of batteries. Last week, I was in Pasadena to visit Idealab, whose founder, Bill Gross, couldn't wait to take me up to his roof to show off his Sunflower solar system, which tracks the sun with small mirrors and concentrates its rays onto a single silicon pod. It now helps to power his whole office.
A few days later I interviewed the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Gary Morgenthaler, whose firm has invested in quantum-dot-based thin films for solar panels and has looked at one start-up that is bioengineering algae to produce oil. I ended the week at the Greentech Innovation Network in San Francisco, which brought together dozens of clean-power innovators to swap ideas. The meeting was organized by Kleiner Perkins, the venture firm that helped start Google and now backs an array of energy start-ups.
Bill Gross, of Idealab, said: "The price of fossil fuel goes up enough, and look what happens. With no government regulation, investment and innovation in the energy space takes off with more talent and focus than any government program. It's a 'distributed... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
