Will cheap oil affect green innovation?

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>> So the question is about the low price of oil. How does that impact the prospect for cleaner technology really going forward? Yeah, I mean, not only is, is oil cheap, but coal is also cheap, right? So we have to make a societal decision at some level whether we're going to protect the innovators somewhat from the cyclic nature of the, if the oil price keeps going up and crashing, it tends to be kind of a random walk. I mean, we saw a pretty steep decline here in the last year. It's, it can wipe out a whole generation of startups trying to, to bring us renewable fuels. So the government can help some by creating like a, a, a standard for a certain percentage of our fuel to come from renewable energy, and that will benefit us in the long run, but that would help us to get the innovation through the cyclical nature of, of the commodities, but in order to clean things up, we're going to need to clean up the grid of coal, and we're going to need to clean out the fuels to be built based roughly on biomass, right? So we can clean the grid of coal with things like solar, wind, modify with better batteries, and probably some geothermal because that's, if we can engineer the geothermal so we can make geothermal resources using advanced drilling technology, then we can, then we have a thousand year supply of energy under the United States and potentially available to us. So there's lots of opportunity here. The question is how do we protect the innovation to some extent through down the learning curve past the cost of oil and past the cost of coal. The German, Germany's helped a lot by and the people who have feeding tariffs by, you know, paying higher prices to put solar and wind installations. And so they lead in the, the world and the installation of those things, and they're helping to drive down the technology curve much as the State of California was doing here with some of their solar programs. Given the budget situation in California, it's hard to imagine that California will continue to be the leader in those kind of programs so I didn't know if, that probably takes, probably hurts the Valley. It probably hurts our future, but, you know, the deficit being what it is, but we have to deal with coal, and we have to deal with, we have to close the loops on those, and those technologies - wind, solar, with batteries, geothermal, and fuels from celluastic phonetic, advanced fuels from celluastic biomass, probably fuels that are better than ethanol, ones that are blendable directly into diesel and gasoline - if we can find pathways to make those fuels from bio, bio, you know, non-food biomass inexpensively, then, then we have a chance. Now, if you go and look at, you know, like the, we do a free energy calculation. I want to go from this molecule to that molecule, you can tell that the embodied energy is such that, you know, it's possible there's a pathway that's, that's very inexpensive. We just don't have the chemistry to do that. We have to find that chemistry, and, it, it may not exist, but it's at least, it, it potentially exists, and that's the kind of thing that we would hope the entrepreneurs would be looking for.

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