Khosla, Romm Fire Back At '60 Minutes' Cleantech Exposé

An anonymous reader writes "CBS recently aired a segment on its 60 Minutes TV newsmagazine critical of what it referred to as the 'Cleantech' industry, i.e. clean energy startups, often founded by Silicon Valley/IT businessmen and engineers. Correspondent Lesley Stahl adapted the familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style when interviewing venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, an investor in biofuel startup KiOR and dozens of other clean energy businesses, then following up with other industry experts who appear to refute Khosla's assertions. Stahl ran down a list of high profile taxpayer-subsidized industry failures and suggests that private investors such as Khosla seem to be losing money as well. Khosla has just responded in the form of an open letter to CBS News which lists allegedly false and inaccurate statements in the 60 Minutes program, while pointing out that the fossil fuels industry is also heavily subsidized by government. Khosla, a longtime general partner at Kleiner Perkins before starting his own firm, was one of four Stanford graduate students who co-founded Sun Microsystems in the early 1980s. Physicist and climate blogger Joseph Romm posted a response to what he referred to as the '60 Minutes hit job on clean energy' last week; other environmentalists have also weighed in."

Comments

"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[ebonum]

What are you talking about? Didn't you see the 60 Minutes/NSA love fest?

Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[ebonum]

I would have respect for 60 Minutes, if they started the NSA interviews with: "A lot of people think you should be in jail and branded a traitor to your country. You seem to act with complete disregard of the Constitution and you wrongly assumed you wouldn't get caught. Plus, you haven't stopped any terrorism, you live in secret with no over site, you've pissed away billions in taxpayer money and all the while you are drawing crazy high pay. What say you?"

That is the "familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[Anonymous Coward]

The Free press hasn't been free for a long time and the problem is you/we have done nothing to fix it and will continue to do nothing.

Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[jmac_the_man]

Why be surprised at it, after all it's the same network that has or had Maddow, Mathews, and Olbermann on it and they've always had their faces stuck to the ass of the democratic party.

60 Minutes is a CBS thing. Maddow and Mathews work for NBC, and Olbermann used to work there as well. (He currently hosts a sports show on Disney/ABC-owned ESPN.)

Your larger point (about how all the networks openly support the Democrats) is spot on, but a better example of CBS's malpractice was Rather using forged documents to claim that George W. Bush didn't really serve in the National Guard.

Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[SpankiMonki]

...after all it's the same network [CBS] that has or had Maddow, Mathews, and Olbermann on it and they've always had their faces stuck to the ass of the democratic party.

Mod +5 Informative!

It's only gotten worse in the last few years, to the point where they've become a full-on propaganda arm for the democrats and especially the Obama administration.

Wait...I thought this story was about 60 Minutes/CBS airing a hit piece on "Cleantech"...isn't that an Obama/Democrat favorite?

Maybe this signals that CBS is transitioning to becoming a full-on propaganda arm for the Republicans. Great news!

Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[squiggleslash]

CBS is not NBC, employer of Maddow et al.

CBS generally veers right, but generally it doesn't show it in the same way as Fox News. On the one occasion they kinda sorta went pro-Democrat (So called "Rathergate"), they didn't say anything that wasn't pretty much public domain already, and they botched it by taking seriously some seriously dubious "evidence".

This year CBS has been trying to outfox Fox, and has done so badly, to the point that there's been resignations. 60 Minutes pretty much fabricated an entire story about Benghazi, for instance. Part of the problem is that CBS isn't expected to be like Fox, and so when it does pull stunts like this, it gets caught, quickly.

Re:"familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

[cyberchondriac]

I'm not disputing that the NSA has far overstepped their bounds, but also bear in mind we don't really know what terrorism they may or may not have stopped. They're not likely to publicly publish their doings, good or bad, to avoid tipping off enemies (among other obvious things). Exposing anything about their accomplishments, in anything other than the vaguest detail which would satisfy no one here, could also potentially expose their methodologies or contacts, or at least, point to a clue. It's not their protocol to take those risks, which also becomes very convenient for them. Such is the nature of security.
Granted, they didn't stop the Boston bombers, but there might have been other attempts we aren't told about that they foiled. Or maybe there weren't. But I'm not going to assume either way.

What a surprise

[Indy1]

Like most press, 60 minutes engages in the run of the mill "assault journalism" thats heavy on accusations, and light on the facts. Anyone who takes ANY journalist at face value needs to be hit with a clue by 4.

Re:What a surprise

[Luckyo]

I still find some press trustworthy in a general sense (i.e. identify that particular publication's interests, and look in them for articles about things that aren't about it).

Also there's the whole "I like the old BBC foreign reporters who openly reported truth about Falkalands War in face of massive opposition from everyone in their country from government to right wing press".
Sadly most of these guys now work for Al-Jazeera after UK bureaucrats finally got their dream of firing all those inconvenient people when BBC was downsized a few years ago. Incidentally Al-Jazeera was trying to build up its own english language publication at the same time, so most of them ended up there. And for a while, the stuff they reported on was absolutely amazing. You'd get videos on Al-Jazeera of all those same middle aged brit reporters right in the middle of conflict zone reporting on various massively inconvenient facts. Even to their employer.

You still do, but sadly they came down on them now quite a bit, but it's still functional as yet another counter-balance to propaganda machine we have here in the West.

Crafting the narrative

[TubeSteak]

It doesn't matter what is true, only what people believe is true.

There is a lot of money at stake if anyone pokes holes in the narrative that 'green energy is a job killing boondoggle.'
Even more important than money, there are ideological principles at risk if Big Government is shown to succeed at [anything].

The real tragedy of it all is that the USA needs a comprehensive and coherent energy policy.
When the government tells everyone what it is focusing on and where it will be spending money,
big business can follow because they know that their expenditures will not be a solo risk.

Instead we've ended up with unconnected subsidies that still get treated with aggressive hostility by conservative voices.
Their solution? More fracking and more coal. Not exactly a progressive or forward looking vision of our future.

Re:Crafting the narrative

[SuricouRaven]

The USA doesn't have a comprehensive policy because anything it does will be un-done as soon as power passes to the other party. Look at the recent repeal of the lighting energy efficiency standard, for example. With the two parties constantly bickering and trying to undermine each other, and the balance of power shifting every few years, commitment is a serious problem.

If the US government coul commit to anything beyond the next term of office, they'd have their flag on Mars by now.

Re:Crafting the narrative

[phantomfive]

that still get treated with aggressive hostility by conservative voices.

Come on, there's no point in turning it into a political fight. Remember Bush was a big fan of wind power, and even acknowledged that global warming is a problem, by the end. Then again, Bush did turn kind of weird by the end. Weird in a good way. By which I mean, he didn't get any of his goals done. Which was good compared to his first term.

Re:Crafting the narrative

[jcr]

The real tragedy of it all is that the USA needs a comprehensive and coherent energy policy.

Bullshit.

What the USA needs w/r/t energy is for the government to fuck off and let supply and demand sort it out. When solar power becomes more cost effective than natural gas, it won't take tax money to make it happen.

-jcr

Re:Crafting the narrative

[taiwanjohn]

Amory Lovins, the well known clean-tech maven, agrees with you. He advocates removing all energy subsidies to create a truly level playing field. But the Big-Oil crowd will never let that happen, because they know that without the massive support they get from the government, they would rapidly be crushed by competition from renewables. In the end, it doesn't matter though, because renewables keep getting better and cheaper while fossil fuels keep getting more expensive. It's just a matter of time.

Re:Crafting the narrative

[SuricouRaven]

Also, that cheap energy is a key driver of the rest of the economy. Cheap power and transport is what lets other industries thrive. It makes shipping goods halfway around the world and back economical, allowing for production to be consolidated in large factories to benefit from an economy of scale (and cheaper labor costs/regulations) and brings down the cost of goods. Cheap petrol allows convenient long-distance travel - the car created the suburbs, by allowing people to commute to work further from home. Businesses drawing in customers from a large area allows for the existence of the mega-store and shopping mall. Take away the cheap, subsidised energy and there will be knock-on effects in other industries.

Re:Crafting the narrative

[sycodon]

Can you enlighten us all and tell us where the fossil fuel industry is being given checks for hundreds of millions of dollars like in the case of Solyndra , etc?

Because reducing the amount of money you take out of a functioning, profitable enterprise is not the same as handing money to a company that doesn't produce anything, sell anything, let alone make any kind of profit.

Journalists Cannot Cover Tech

[retroworks]

What's disturbing is when they not only got it wrong, but get an Emmy and other journalism awards for an erroneous story. When it comes to tech, they are really out of their element. MIT Study disproves the allegation? Original source admits to fabricating statistics they report? The journalist community never gives themselves an asterisk for gotcha-news-on-steroids. Do a little background on the biggest award winner in 60 Minutes stable, Wasteland. Huge accolades. But source admitted fabricating data, MIT studies prove it wrong. Journalists just cannot cover tech.

The closest thing to ombudsman or peer review is John Stewart or Colbert Report, and they are not exactly techies. Seems impossible to get misreported tech stories corrected. It's like asking an English major to take a Calculus class over again. if it was too complicated for the reporter to get right the first time, they don't want to go back again.

They should give a Polk or Pelley award to Ira Glass, NPR's "This American Life", for going back on his story about Apple and Foxconn in 2012. That was really classy, and it also told an important lesson on how easy it is for a reporter to swallow passionately delivered bullshit about the "juju" of high technology.http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

Re:Journalists Cannot Cover Tech

[Fulminata]

It's not just tech. TV journalism in general, and 60 Minutes in particular, gets it wrong all the time. 60 Minutes is notorious for going into every story knowing what their conclusion is going to be from the beginning and then framing and editing every second of their coverage to support that pre-determined conclusion.

This isn't something new. Before I got into the tech industry I worked in insurance for a major US retailer back in the 90s. While there, 60 Minutes did an "expose" on the dangers of shopping carts. Lots of discussion of people and children hurt around shopping carts, but not one word about now 99%+ of those accidents are a result of people stupidly using carts in ways they weren't intended to be used. Pointing that out would have gone against the narrative they were trying to construct about how inherently dangerous shopping carts were.

The truly amazing thing to me is that so many people can see journalists routinely get things wrong about subjects those people are personally knowledgeable on, yet still trust those same journalists on any other topic they cover.

Re:Article link (missing from prev post)

[Bob the Super Hamste]

So in reading that little article it looks like the actual cash giveaways from government to the entire fossil fuel industry worldwide by all governments are ~$300 billion. The quoted 1.3 trillion subsidy would seem to be a rather made up number, to quote the article:

The largest contributor to the subsidies is the failure to properly price carbon pollution, costing a little over $1 trillion.

Then there is this little tid bit about how to correct this situation and the subsidy from the US:

According to CleanTechnica, the IMF has estimated that in order for the US to correct the situation, it will need to setup a new system of fees, levies, and taxes that will cost more than $500 billion a year.

But earlier in the article they quoted the United States subsidy as being about ~$502 billion.

I used to admire US journalists

[Taco Cowboy]

That is the "familiar confrontational 60 Minutes style"

I escaped from communist China in the early 1970's, and when I landed on the United States of America, I was totally awed by many things that I could never ever dream of when I was in China.

One of those was the integrity of the journalists of the United States of America.

The Vietnam War was on at that time, and there was plenty of "Patriotism" in America in such that "if you don't agree with us you get outta here" attitude, but yet, there were journalists who braved the societal norm in reporting (and printing the news in the newspapers) what actually took place in Vietnam.

Many of those journalists were called "traitors" and they were treated as "Viet Cong Supporters" back then, but yet, their integrity remained intact and report the news as it was (not the propaganda the government wanted them to report).

And the subsequent episode of the dethronement of Richard (I am not a crook) Nixon because of the "deep throat" saga.

I was totally awed by the bravery and the diamond-hardened integrity of those American journalists.

Today ? American journalism ?

Ptuuuuiiii !!

Re:I used to admire US journalists

[whitroth]

Ok, you want to talk about the Vietnam War... and how many of the assholes on slashdot are dissing you were even *born* then? And how many of them were in combat in, say, Iraq?

I'd guess that approaches zero as a limit.

Fact: after Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, the UN supervised the ->militaryallowed- the referendum to go forth, 80% of the country would have voted for Ho, who they viewed as the George Washington of their country, having led the fight, first against the Japanese during the War, then against the French.
Fact: A hell of a lot of use did everything we could from getting drafted, and turning into cannon fodder in an illegal and immoral war. (Quote: Dick Cheney, as to why he didn't go in, though he was for the war: "I had other agendas.") Then there's party boy George W. Bush, who joined the Texas Air National Guard, then *deserted* for a year? year and a half? two years? (AWOL: absent without leave for more than 30 days)

Speculation: senior government officials under LBJ heard rumors that Nixon had agents in Paris in '68, during the peace talks, telling the North Vietnamese that they'd get a better deal with him as president, and so they shouldn't settle with LBJ.

Fact: Tapes released in the last 10 years have Nixon and Kissinger talking in '71, with Nixon saying he could end the war, and Kissinger advising him that if he did that before the election, he'd lose the election. Needless to say, there's *thousands* more names on The Wall.

Fact: Nixon expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia (and lied about it), and that they were killing a *lot* of innocence civilians (look up the estimated numbers of dead in 'Nam).

So yeah, Fonda was appalled by the murder allegedly in "our" name. So were a lot of us.

One last note: Tolkien was translated into a hell of a lot of languages... including Vietnamese. One unit of the South Vietnamese army chose, as their insignia.. the Lidless Eye of Sauron. Meanwhile, the other side, short guys, in black pj's, with bare furry feet.....

                    mark

Re:I used to admire US journalists

[Doitroygsbre]

Mark, I'm not sure if I offended you with my post, but if I did, I apologize. I am well aware that Pres. Nixon did. I heard a number around 50,000+ Americans needlessly died because he wanted to be president. IIRC it was president Johnson's library that released audio tapes talking about wiretaps on the South Vietnamese Ambassador that showed Nixon was secretly doing everything he could to keep the war from ending going back to 1968.

I feel really bad for the soldiers that couldn't avoid the draft. My father in law was drafted around 1965 and it earned him a purple heart. He came back missing most of his right lung, a good chunk of his liver, and most of his sanity. He spent over a year at Walter Reed, which he had to be snuck into under cover of night to avoid being attacked by the anti-war protestors. Every once in a while he says something really fucked up about the war and what he went though, but most of the time he won't say anything. He still has night terrors occasionally, even with the battery of medicines he is on to keep him functional. Sometimes I think the dead are the lucky ones.

Re:I used to admire US journalists

[OneAhead]

Oh, so that would explain why the WMD lie, the Saddam-supports-Al-Qaeda lie and the general "rationale" for going to Iraq were repeated spinelessly by the patriotic media in the USA, while being lambasted in most of the media in the rest of the world. Because the American media hate the Republicans who came up with the idea and only "parrot govt propaganda so long as Democrats are in power". Got it.

Alter reading some comments, I would like to point

[Anonymous Coward]

1) the 60min program was about cleantech. All the comments about oil being worse, carbon emission externalities, global warming, etc. are pointless. Is not that they are not true, is that the money invested in cleantech should maybe have been invested differently: "this people flushed 100 billion down the drain!" (if it were true) is not justified with "but these others burned 500 billion in a bonfire!" (even if it were also true). There are obvious problems with fossil fuels and lots of money where used to try to find a solution, the program's thesis is that that money was not correctly expended. So please avoid going about GW woes time and time again.

2) After reading the script and Khosla's allegations, I am with CBS.

3) I am not from the USA (and so it was not my money what was allegedly wasted), so I think I have a more detached position here. Many of the comments seem to simply attack CBS because the program did not acknowledge their pre existing political ideas. I think that is wrong, unless you can articulate your objections.

4) The idea that the program conveys is that the money spent gave not good results and then much of that invested is sold at great loss to chinese investors that probably will benefit more than the USA taxpayers. I think that the program succeeds in that.

5) Even so, maybe some of the cleantech projects will ultimately succeed and gave back so many benefits that covers all the failures we see now (that is one of the opinions from Khosla), but I find the right now doubtful. Even the company many cite as successful (Tesla), is right now just a company that makes expensive luxury cars to enormously wealthy people (of course that can chang in the future, but it is so right now), if that is the best outcome of so many public money invested, the results are really bad.

Still alive.

[westlake]

Who cares. The only people that watch this show are people that fell asleep in front of their tv 20 years ago.

But they have the money to support the campaigns that touch on the issues they care about and wake up each November in time to vote.

Re:You keep using that word...

[jmac_the_man]

It's worse than that. The largest of the "subsidies" that you have to include to get to the $1.3T figure they throw around is "negative externalities." Essentially, the environmentalists are making the argument that they want to create a "carbon tax" that they charge to energy companies, which the guy quoted in the article says would collect a total of $550 billion per year.

The carbon tax he's talking about isn't a law that's on the books. It's a proposal for a law that he wants the government to pass. And he's counting the failure of the government to pass that law as a subsidy.

Global warming denial campaign

[h00manist]

Paid "news", funded by the oil+coal guys.

Coal+oil companies are on a disinformation campaign about traffic, pollution, accidents, global warming, economic costs, and a host of crazy, irrational arguments. Their common conclusion "pollution and waste is the better alternative"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil#Funding_of_global_warming_disinformation_and_denial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers#Fossil_fuel_and_chemical_industry_lobbying

subsidy misnomer

[camg188]

cash giveaways from government to the entire fossil fuel industry

The last I checked, no cash was being given away to oil companies. Some people use the term "subsidies" for political purposes when a more accurate definition would be "doing business with."
The two biggest so-called subsidies are the strategic oil reserve and HEAP heating assistance. Both of which involve the government simply buying fuel, not handing out money.

It would be like saying that Boeing is subsidized because the government bought a bunch of jets from them.

obvious errors in the rebuttal

[khallow]

I noticed these three myopic talking points nestled in Khosla's rebuttal.

Fact: Contrary to your assertion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has created 55,000 new cleantech jobs.

For the first one, this is a notorious gimmick in public works projects these days in the US. Speak of the all the wonderful jobs that have been created while ignoring that jobs have been lost via opportunity cost from tax revenue taken and lost on bankrupt companies and poor use of funds.

Fact: The DOE loan program, despite your implications, has a 97% success rate. The former program head, Jonathan Silver, expects it to make money, not be a subsidy.

And the "97% success rate" is for companies that haven't yet gone bankrupt in the few years since the category of loans were given (2009 and after). There's been no evaluation of the value of DoE loan projects that were undertaken or whether these will be able to pay off the loans in the long run.

For example, I've seen debt issued of $4 per watt of solar generation. That's rather high especially given that the companies in question could have done a PV installation for up to half that cost.

Fact: There is $51 billion remaining in DOE loan money. The amounts in the CBS report are far from âoespentâ or allocated. You seem to want to cite big numbers, whether they are true or not!

In any private business with proper accounting procedures, they would have to put something like the DOE loan guarantees on its balance sheet as a liability. Those funds might not be spent, but they would be allocated. The US government can just pretend it doesn't exist legally.

> That's it for the main problems. That's half his claims made. I also am dubious of the claim that the US subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of half a trillion a year, especially the "failing to properly price carbonâ(TM)s negative externalities" which probably makes up a lion's share of that alleged subsidy.

Re:obvious errors in the rebuttal

[Areyoukiddingme]

The fact is, the fossil fuel industry doesn't receive ANY subsidies.

Bullshit.

In 2009:

• Tenaska's Taylorville Energy Center – loan coverage $2.6 billion for a 730 MW coal-fired IGCC with CCS.
• Leucadia's Indiana Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.6 billion to produce Substitute Natural Gas (syngas) from coal for sale to customers in Indiana, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.
• Leucadia's Mississippi Gasification SNG project – loan coverage of $1.689 billion to produce syngas from petroleum coke feedstock, for sale to electric utilities in the region, with proposed carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.

Subsidies identical to the type received by Tesla and Solyndra both.

In July 2013, the US Department of Energy made available $8 billion in loan guarantees to the fossil fuel industry, again, the identical type of subsidy received by Tesla. For an industry that has been recording record profits for the past 6 years.

So either stop claiming Solyndra received a subsidy or stop claiming fossil fuel industries don't receive any. You can't have it both ways.

Re:Alter reading some comments, I would like to po

[aitikin]

5) Even so, maybe some of the cleantech projects will ultimately succeed and gave back so many benefits that covers all the failures we see now (that is one of the opinions from Khosla), but I find the right now doubtful. Even the company many cite as successful (Tesla), is right now just a company that makes expensive luxury cars to enormously wealthy people (of course that can chang in the future, but it is so right now), if that is the best outcome of so many public money invested, the results are really bad.

I don't have time right now to address the other issues you've pointed out, but I feel the need to point out that you're wrong about Tesla. As a 2010 post on non-other than slashdot references, Tesla makes the drivetrain for the RAV4EV, which ends up being about a $20k premium over the equivalent, gasoline based RAV4. Additionally, Tesla has paid off their subsidized loans early. In even more recent news, Musk was on CNN's New Day in a a prerecorded interview this morning commenting on how they're working on a new car that's going to be more reasonably priced (about 1/2 the price of the Model S) to be released in about 3 years.

Frankly, if it takes a company 13 years to go from no product, to 5 years later an extremely high end, only the super rich can afford situation to a situation, that's fine, then 8 years later they're at hey, an upper middle class, or even middle class individual can afford their vehicle, I'd consider that reasonable. Especially if they decided that it was more important to pay off their debts first.

Tax Depreciation Is a Subsidy

[Etherwalk]

The last I checked, no cash was being given away to oil companies.

Not sure what direct subsidies they're talking about, but depreciation is going to be one--I bet tax depreciation on oil company infrastructure is well above economic depreciation. That means FEDGOV is giving them a subsidy.

For example, if they can depreciate a piece of infrastructure over 20 years and it lasts 40, they get to write off (i.e. not pay taxes) on more than their actual loss as a business expense, in effect getting a tax subsidy from the government. (Lowering taxes is the same as giving a subsidy--the only difference is flipping a sign to confuse laypeople; tax subsidies are just a way of giving Congress political cover when they give money to special interest). The effect is increased the fact that after 20 years, they probably sell individual pieces of infrastructure between subs or otherwise adjust ownership so that they can take the depreciation again.

Re: USA needs a comprehensive and coherent energy

[pastafazou]

Anyone with half a brain in their head can compare the energy density of oil (41.9MJ/Kg) versus Uranium (570,000MJ/Kg) versus any and every other energy source available and conclude pretty easily that atomic energy is where we should be focusing our efforts. Given the fact that we already have the technology working, why would we be wasting so much time, effort, and money for alternative sources?

Re:You keep using that word...

[Col. Klink (retired)]

"A subsidy is a form of financial or in kind support extended to an economic sector..."

Direct payments are only one form of subsidy. I'm not arguing that we should or shouldn't offer tax breaks to one industry or another, I'm just suggesting that it is you who does not know what that word means. Offering a tax break for one activity over another favors the activity that has a lower effective tax rate.

Re:Why do you ignore the money on the other side?

[MillionthMonkey]

And where is your link to support your $500 billion?

RTFA: Fact: The U.S. spent $502 billion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2011.

I'll match a figure you can document.

Which proves you're full of shit.