A Tour of the Energy Future

My breakthrough session turned out to be a guided tour of the future, held in the little basement fonduestube of a 137-year-old hotel. MIT had organized a dinner featuring three of its scientists and their alternative energy technologies, and you knew it was a hot ticket when you walked in the door. The grotto held only about 60 people beneath its vaulted stone ceiling, but among them were venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, Google co-founder Larry Page, and the shaggy, newly minted YouTube billionaire Chad Hurley. First Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist with a gift for the marketing of ideas, riffed about the coming clean-energy revolution.” Green is the new red, white and blue,” he said, “and this is not your parents’ energy crisis.” Once he’d warmed up the crowd, the MIT scientists took turns presenting their visions of the future.

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