When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

Is Gore just a wild-eyed optimist with a compelling end-of-days sermon who truly believes with enough of our Yankee moxie and knowhow we can accomplish this lofty goal? Maybe. But he's more Joseph P. Kennedy than JFK. More likely, he just realizes that if Kleiner Perkins's investments in cleantech don't pay off in 10 years, he and buddy John Doerr won't be able to threaten, "One of these days, to the moon!"

Several Valley investors who monitor startups tell me they don't bother sending Web-oriented entrepreneurs to pitch Kleiner anymore; they say the firm just doesn't seem interested.

Why would these gamblers leave the table where just a few years ago they were winning big?

For starters, broadband penetration in the developed world has nearly reached the saturation point, meaning that new Web services are increasingly competing for share in a market of fixed size. Sure, bandwidth demands are increasing because the media and tools being developed are getting richer, but those are ultimately incremental plays, and barrier to entry is much, much higher than it was for Google. The fact that there hasn't been a significant Web IPO since Google, or another acquisition the size of YouTube, tends to make me think less that Kleiner Perkins has lost its touch and more that they've smartly shifted focus to areas where big dollars make a difference.

The market that is growing worldwide is mobile, because mobile devices are less expensive than traditional computers and deploying wireless data networks is much cheaper than building out fixed-line access. Hence, in developing markets in Asia, South America and even Africa, there's a hunger for killer apps besides voice and text that will fit into your pocket — hence the $100 million iFund. Even if the money is nominally for development of iPhone applications, there's no reason to think that a good product and business model for that device can't be translated for devices running Palm, Windows and Google's Android as well.

But the key lies in John Doerr's missionary zeal for cleantech. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore (now a KP partner) wrote the following about global warming:

What are the opportunities such a crisis also offers? They include not just new jobs and new profits, though there will be plenty of both. We can build clean engines; we can harness the sun and the wind; we can stop wasting energy; we can use our planet's plentiful coal resources without heating the planet.

The fact is, no matter how big Crpstr.com gets, the upside falls short of the profit potential in energy and transportation by at least three or four orders of magnitude. As Lashinsky points out, the size of the energy market is $4 trillion.

It's important to remember that long before California was where you went to start your social networking startup, the primary industries driving the economy were mining, oil and defense, roughly in that chronological order. Transportation and communications technology merely allowed capitalists in the state and beyond to extend their reach in these fields around the world without leaving the comfort of their Atherton or Upper East Side home.

Telling are both KP's investment in oil exploration firm Terralliance and Gore's cheerleading for clean coal technology. While finding new and better ways to arrange for some nookie with your iPhone while wandering up and down Valencia may seem like a good investment to horny geeks, KP is looking beyond placing small bets at Faro and looking to buy the table — because the house always wins, and in global capitalism, the energy market is the house. (Photo by AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Anita and I just installed solar panels on our home, and we couldn’t be happier. We used a firm called Akeena Solar which has been in business for several years and has offices around the state. If you’ve ever thought of putting solar on your home—there has never been a better time.

Shilling for your own company without disclosure is certainly one way to pass the baton to presumptive Governator challenger Gavin Newsom, who will undoubtedly point to this program to give wealthy San Francisco property owners taxpayer money for a handful of solar panels as an example of his stellar environmental record. Mixing business and politics and implementing costly new tax incentive programs while slashing the budget for social services? God bless America. (Photos by AP/Branimir Kvartuc and AP/Eric Risberg)

Obama. He's joined the Democratic senator's "India Policy Team." But there's more to it than just ties to India. Khosla is also a big investor in ethanol production, and is pictured here with General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, and Bill Roe, president of ethanol manufacturer Coskata. Obama has taken large donations from ethanol lobbyists and pandered to corn growers as a strategy to boost support in conservative southern Illinois during his run for the senate. Obama can certainly turn to Khosla to argue the merits of turning food into fuel by proxy. Personally, I'm just surprised Khosla has offered no support for presumptive American prime minister Amitabh Bachchan. (Photo by AP/Gary Malerba)

• The environment, burning enough fuel to power a car for a year in just one hour.
• Public safety: Even though private planes incur the same air-traffic control costs as commercial airliners, commercial planes pay for 95 percent of FAA air-traffic control costs in $2,015 in taxes per flight, while just accounting for 73 percent of air control capacity. Private planes only pay $236 per flight in taxes.
• Tax revenues: Private plane buyers can take a larger deduction their first year owning a new jet.
• The war on terror: The Department of Homeland Security IDs private planes as a particular risk.

A photo op in front of "world's sexiest and best high-performance electric car" was a rare chance to earn some bona fides from both sides of the aisle and demonstrate his sentiment that postpartisanship is the new black. It's another example of how desperate Californians are to have their cake and eat it too: We'll still have erotically-charged automobiles, but they'll be zero-emission! Never mind that luring businesses with expensive corporate welfare means more potholes to ruin the suspension on Schwarzenegger's own Tesla Roadster.

Woolsey is clearly playing an active and public role as the face of the movement, tooling around Virgina last month in a biofuel-powered Ford, touting the algae-derived blend that's just perfect for the military's vast fleet of diesel vehicles. And he's the perfect bipartisan foil, a longtime Democrat who's worked with Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton:

He still thinks the United States should continue its global military role even as it untangles itself from the Middle East, standing by the decision to depose Saddam Hussein. "I'd support his ouster again if there weren't a drop of oil in Iraq," he explains.

The greenocon promise is a Fortress America of tanks and solar panels, plug-in hybrids and nuclear reactors. I can hear the strains of "America, Fuck Yeah!" now, and it brings a single, deeply profound tear to my eye. (Photo by AP/Charles Krupa)

Hopefully some of that power will go to San Francisco, which is already struggling to meet its power needs, and working on building new fossil fuel-powered plants. Because the City's hunky god-mayor, Gavin Newsom, wants to build a fleet of electric cars and a network of charging stations, and that power currently comes from coal and oil. Thankfully, Newsom is practically BFF with PG&E, so surely they can bask together in the warm rays of publicity and profits, respectively. (Illustration by BrightSource Energy)

(Photo by Kevin Krejci)

Young used his time on stage during the keynote to show off a 10-disc Blu-Ray project that included almost every song he'd ever recorded, in chronological order. Sun's role? In providing Sony the Java code that allows for interactive features on Blu-ray. Young said that while he'd been working on the project for 15 years, only now was the digital audio quality up to standard. Each track had visual accompaniment from the relevant era. When a recording from the compact disc era appeared, he joked "We took a giant dump at this point." He also mentioned that he was working to create a car that didn't require stops for refueling, which also has some tangential relationship to Java, showing off an American mid-century model he's entering in the automotive X-Prize challenge.

Interestingly enough, us bloggers with our hair-trigger deadlines were given first crack at asking questions of Young (and indulging in the complimentary fruit plate), while the print reporters with their leisurely deadlines had to wait outside. As we waited for Young and his entourage to arrive, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly showed off his Livescribe pen for recording audio in time with written notes to News.com editor-in-chief Dan Farber, who remarked sagely about the need for special Livescribe paper, "So they're selling the razors and the blades." But the two quickly went into fanboy mode when Young arrived, peppering the man with questions before anyone else could get a word in edgewise.

The car project, part of a documentary Young's working on with filmmaker Larry Johnson, a longtime collaborator, seems to be a bit of a lark. He wants to create a superefficient car that doesn't need to stop for gas or electricity, and he wants it to be heavy. While I might have gotten a C+ in college physics, it's enough to know that you can't run a Lincoln Continental on unicorns and rainbows. "It's very kooky. When you try to do something like this, people say you're nuts." Wonder why?

I mostly went on behalf of my father, who's pretty much a superfan (to the point where, besides the mutton-chop sideburns and dark glasses, he and Young seem to have identical fashion sense). My question had to do with the fact that my father had already bought Young's work on vinyl, then again on CD, and will now probably buy it all over again on Blu-ray in the fall. "I think it's the same as Microsoft selling the same applications every year with new bells and whistles." He then made this vinyl collector very happy by lambasting the quality of digital audio, and saying that he still records and edits everything in analog.

Young was at his best when he pierced through the Sun marketing hype of the morning. When O'Reilly asked how the musician felt about the "free" aspects of Sun's open-source efforts with Java, Young veered well of the "Keep on rockin' in a free world" tagline I assume Sun paid dearly for: "The free aspect... I think that's a word, that's a marketing thing." Touché.

Say a bunch of guys in the carpenter's union don't know how to work with bamboo. Well, here are some young people who have been trained to work with bamboo. Suddenly, rather than them being in the back of the line for the less-skilled blue-collar jobs, these kids have the advantage.

After all, the Valley free-enterprise culture is rabidly antilabor — why pay a competitive salary and offer health benefits when illegal immigrants will landscape your Sand Hill Road office grounds for a subsistence wage? The reason that those union carpenters of yesteryear could afford to become homeowners, take vacations, and bring their kids to the hospital wasn't because management just handed them collective bargaining agreements, forty-hour work weeks and health benefits.

Jones is right in pointing out that construction and installation work aren't like the manufacturing jobs that could easily migrate abroad, leaving American inner cities in tatters. But while a green building boom could last for a generation or two, it won't help the aging unemployed today. And it will eventually leave inner-city communities high and dry once again — unless it's accompanied by fundamental structural changes in social policy.

I admit, it's easy to get seduced by Jones's optimistic rhetoric, and easier still since he's a proven success in terms of getting money for job training programs for Oakland residents. Like Jones, I like to poke at the pretensions of "lifestyle environmentalists" in the "eco-elite," so I'm willing to keep listening. But history still makes me tend toward skepticism that cleantech will guarantee sustainable urban economies — and downright cynical when it comes to believing whatever new jobs are created will go to the communities that need them most. (Photo from Van Jones)

You also need some leadership skills. You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.

Page points out how many engineers have been hired by Big Oil to find every last drop of crude, calling it "disproportionate to the return that they could get elsewhere." A big proponent of geothermal and solar, he further describes how cleantech investment that has focused on the move from fossil fuels to electricity doesn't solve the root problem of our grid being powered mostly by coal. And in his view, venture capitalists are ten years too late in funding green initiatives:

Look at VC investment in clean energy. What caused that to happen was two things: the price of oil going up and global warming. It's mostly the price of oil going up.

I think it's everybody who cares about making progress in the world. Let's say there are 10,000 people working on these things. If we make that 100,000, we'll probably get 10 times the progress.

A factory-installed plug-in hybrid option — though I wonder if tapping a coal-powered electrical grid improves the Prius's carbon footprint that greatly. The real questions are: Who will prove more environmental in the court of pseudoscientific, envirosocial one-upsmanship — the owners who hold on to their existing vehicle, or those who trade in for the new, more fuel-efficient ones? And will the Bay Area see more violent, Prius-hating backlash?(Photo by Rick Audet)

Looks like you guys were correct about Yahoo's SF shuttles — today we switched over to Bauer's Limo as the shuttle vendor. Day 1 so far has been a sheer disaster: on almost every route the buses were at least 40 mins late. No contact numbers were available and the old shuttle dispatch was ringing Compass Transportation number. When the buses would show up, they'd have drivers who looked and drove as if it was their first day on the job — going at around 40mph on an empty stretch of 101. Apparently, the management at Yahoo hasn't grasped the main concept in IT: don't fix it if it ain't broke. Oh, and as far as promised working wifi, leather seats, power outlets, and cupholders — no will do: none of the buses had any of these amenities. I guess if this keeps up, most SF folks will start looking for jobs elsewhere, delivering the promised cost savings.

• Pick a popular, if quixotic, issue: Everybody loves renewable energy, and everyone hates global warming. A few solar panels will do little to change anything except the Hair Apparent's chances for statewide office.
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• Run it through a minion with political ambition: Even though city assessor and Gavster appointee Phil Ting's job doesn't include proposing environmental spending legislation, its his proposal. If it works out, he's got something to sell voters in a run for mayor, and if not, he takes the fall.
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• Suggest that it will help hardworking people: Never mind that this amounts to grants to people who own property in one of the most valuable real-estate markets in the country. These are, in the Newsomverse, homeowners and small businesspeople struggling to make ends meet.
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• Fast-track it to skirt public review: The time to find solutions to global warming is now, not after careful research, competitive bidding and public comment. If anyone questions the process, suggest that they aren't "creative" or "visionary."
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• When all else fails, blame your failure on democracy: Sure, our duly elected public officials are politicians, and therefore should expect politics to be part of the program. So when the Board of Supervisors delay your plan because it has no provisions for funding, don't take responsibility, blame them for petty political opportunism.

(Photo by Kevin Krejci)

Some more digging turned up another suit in San Mateo County courts, but in this one Tesla is the defendant, with original transmission manufacturer Magna suing the company, demanding $5.6 million in outstanding payments. It was the development of a transmission that has been widely cited as the reason for the company's slow march to market with an actual product. Looks like cleantech is like any other emerging industry — the real winners aren't the VCs or the entrepreneurs, but the lawyers. (Photo by Alexander van Dijk)

• Japan and France both have one: If there's anything Californians love more than stuff from France and Japan, I'd like to know what it is. Hell, even China has a bullet train, and they're supposedly Communists.
• Breakfast and dinner at home, meetings in LA: Woo Hollywood talent away from the studios with promises of stock options without having to abandon the family for the night. Hell, invite them down to meet you in San Diego after work.
• It keeps transportation spending in California: We don't manufacture our planes or our cars, why not build trains? Like Tesla's effort to make California an electric-car hub, a bullet train here would breed engineers and contractors with experience in high-speed rail projects for an untapped North American market.
• It's actual cleantech, no greenwashing necessary: No traffic idling, no planes circling, no highway-induced sprawl. Atherton residents would probably even approve a new nuclear reactor to power it. In Nevada.

The train makes all sorts of sense for the Valley, and the fact that it'll probably end in a boondoggle doesn't concern me — I just want it to end, soon, with a wicked fast train. (Photo by Clayton Parker)