Al Gore's Light Bulbs Are Fail
All those curly-cue planet-saving fluorescent light bulbs that Al Gore made everyone buy even though they cost $30 and cast a sickly pale glow DON'T WORK.
The Green Movement Goes Down the Crapper
When did the New York Times Op-Ed page decide to revert to the loopy environmentalism of the 1970s? The latest commercial disguised as a broadside features an author who wants to change the way we wee.
Why Tesla's Elon Musk Could Be the New Preston Tucker
Tesla Motors, the best hope of Silicon Valley's nascent clean-transportation industry, is headed over a financial cliff. The only question is how many customers the electric sportscar maker will take for a ride.
Why Elon Musk could be the next Steve Jobs
When visionaries clash, whose vision do we believe? On newsstands this week,
Newsweek's Dan Lyons , the electric-car maker. Tesla was once the brightest hope of Silicon Valley's clean-transportation industry; now on its fourth CEO in less than two years, it's better known for manufacturing boardroom drama than actual…
Apple's new green scandal
After coming under attack by pro-environment groups, Apple has tried hard to burnish its green image. But its latest laptops could ruin its reputation among the carbon-conscious. Apple has touted the innovation of its new "unibody" laser-manufacturing process, which carves the MacBook's body out of a block of…
Is Elon Musk aiming to take over Tesla?
Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley's troubled electric carmaker, is still running on financial fumes, with $9 million or less in the bank. It's been widely misreported that the company has already raised $40 million. In fact, that's the amount it's hoping to raise, in the form of convertible debt, from current investors in…
Google now getting into the energy business
Let's face it: Google's every attempt to venture outside its holy circle of search and ads has been a financial nonstarter. So is it thinking about getting into the energy business? Yes. Read between the lines in CEO Eric Schmidt's
statements to the New York Times. "Our primary mission is one of information," he says.…
Why Kleiner Perkins thinks green is the new black
The company that funded Netscape, Google and Genentech is now focusing on electric cars, solar power and biofuels.
New York Times contributor Jon Gertner has been meeting with Kleiner partners since last year. His in Sunday's paper goes deep on details of a few KPCB investments such as . But it spends a lot of time…
French newspaper says Macs cause cancer
The
Liberation of France an oft-noticed smell emitted by Apple's Mac Pro desktop computers is caused by a combination of toxins, including benzene, which is known to cause leukemia. The questions now have to be: What did Apple know and when did Apple know it? , full of Mac Pro owners complaining of the smell,…
Vinod Khosla explains Wall Street crisis
Confused by Wall Street? Join the club. Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who is one of Silicon Valley's most revered brains, doesn't get what's happening, either. "If I can't understand it, I suspect a lot of people can't," he told Beet.tv's Andy Plesser in this video interview. "In the name of economic efficiency…
New Macbooks dump plastic for eco-friendly aluminum
AppleInsider's network of loose-lipped leakers claim they've
seen the new MacBooks about to go into production. Gone are the plastic casings that — and scratched way too easily. Like the new iPods and the MacBook Air shown here (I'm skeptical about of the new Macbooks), the new notebooks are reportedly slim and…
Ethanol investor wants to kill the electric car
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — At MIT's EmTech conference, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made a shocking assertion: Electric cars are irrelevant. Unless some unlikely breakthrough in battery technology comes about, they will never take enough of the market to matter. This is a financially convenient argument for Khosla to make:…
Eric Schmidt and Jeff Immelt announce Google-GE partnership
Scheduled to take the stage at Google's latest Zeitgeist gathering are CEO Eric Schmidt and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt.
The plan is to announce a partnership which "is likely to focus on adding network intelligence to the electric grid and improving capacity," according to . The idea is to improve…
Tesla's $250 million manufacturing plant to park in San Jose
Tesla Motors plans to break ground on a 600,000-sq. ft. factory on an 89-acre plot of land in San Jose, according to company officials. The electric-car manufacturer is banking on $250 million in financing from Goldman Sachs and the Department of Energy to build the facility, on top of the $15 million or more in tax…
San Francisco can't find greenbacks for Gavin Newsom's public utility palace
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission had plans to build a monument to renewable energy in
a project that Gavin Newsom pitched to congress as an example of cutting-edge green building practices. But the mayor's newly appointed SFPUC director Ed Harrington, who sagely noted that The City can't balance the books…
A solar power primer for entrepreneurs
Can't face the slog of another social network startup? Go solar! There'll be plenty of spending on solar panels in the coming decade, especially if Barack Obama gets his $150 billion wish for an alternative energy program. Dude, that's NASA-level money, and it could be yours. Here's the first three things you need to…
Green Texas datacenter CityNAP goes into red
When CityNAP, a San Antonio-based datacenter, opened last year, it
bragged about its environmental credentials, such as buying its energy from a wind-power concern. "Sustainability and green business practices make good business sense!" thundered CityNAP president Frank Robles, shown here in the blue shirt, in a press…
Tech industry lobbyists hope merger will get their calls returned
It's OK if you've never heard of the
ITAA or , two of several trade groups which lobby for Valley companies. That's one reason they're . Unlike, say, , tech has no single front group, nor an industrywide issue around which companies can rally. Heck, there isn't even a Wikipedia page for the expired . If Silicon Valley…
Jimmy Wales's green site littered with lies
People who know Jimmy Wales well can't stop snickering about the
launch of Wikia Green, his new anyone-can-edit environmental site. In his private life, Wales is about as green as Dick Cheney, from what they say. He's been known to toss styrofoam coffee cups out the window as he drives — something we imagine might…
