As we talk around a table in his office, Khosla pulls out a laptop and runs me through one of his numerous PowerPoint presentations, flipping the slides quickly until he reaches a diagram of possible remedies for global warming. "I get so many proposals that unless I have in my head what areas I will be interested in ahead of time, it doesn't really work," he tells me.
He's a tireless promoter, speaking at dozens of conferences a year. To contrast himself with Al Gore, now a member of Kleiner Perkins, Khosla likes to focus on what he calls "solutions, not problems." The presentation he shows me, his favorite, is entitled "Mostly Convenient Truths From a Technology Optimist" -- among them that global warming is "a technology crisis, not a resource crisis" and that solutions to large problems require "a dash of greed."
To mainstream environmentalists, some of his views are heretical. He contends that hydrogen fuels are a dead end. Although he drives a hybrid car, he believes that hybrids won't significantly slow global warming. And he's convinced that, in most places, energy from solar panels will for many years be much too expensive.
"There are only four problems with global warming," he tells me, "oil, coal, cement, and steel. If we do those four, we're done."
Done, however, is for tomorrow. Despite his ambitious plans and hundreds of millions of invested dollars, Khosla's companies are still in the early stages. Calera is typical; it is only now preparing to open its first cement plant, on a 200-acre site next door to a gas-fired electric-power utility.
Carbon-dioxide-laden exhaust from the power plant will be captured and used to make and dry the cement. Calera plans to be in pilot production by the end of the year, in commercial operation by 2010, and running 100 sites in North America five years later.
As our meeting comes to an end, Khosla closes his laptop and heads back to work on the biomass paper. An academic is helping him with this one, which he hopes will be accepted by Science or Nature, the prestigious scientific weeklies. "Think of it," he says as he turns away. "Publication in a peer-reviewed journal. What other venture capitalist would even try to do that?"
Image: Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla addressing a plenary session of the 2008 Washington International Renewable Energy Conference in Washington, DC. | Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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