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The moves show how Obama is getting creative at a time when Congress isn’t likely to approve budget increases for clean energy support, or other policies like a cap and trade program or carbon tax. The stimulus package, which injected some $90 billion into clean energy projects and incentives, has largely been spent or the funds expired, so clean energy companies and projects are facing a steep drop in federal support in 2013.

Yet, many will note that the moves are piece meal and not as aggressive as Obama originally proposed when he first ran for office. And some of Obama’s concessions to the natural gas and oil industry will likely anger environmentalists and some clean energy advocates. The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration plans to rewrite its proposal to regulate greenhouse emissions using the Environmental Protection Agency, making the proposal weaker and potentially delaying regulations.

The proposal for using $2 billion in federal leases will emerge over the coming weeks. Obama brought up this plan in the State of the Union speech, calling it an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good. Obama said “If a non-partisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals can get behind this idea, then so can we.”

The use of the infrastructure law is a new idea, and will no doubt prove controversial. A manufacturing association told Bloomberg that the notion had them “freaked out.” The law originally was used to protect water, air and soil from infrastructure projects that could have negative environmental effects.

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Dean Nelson, eBay’s vice president of Global Foundation Services, says the effort, called the Digital Service Efficiency report, “is the miles per gallon measure for technical infrastructure for eBay.” Essentially, the company has boiled its business down to a single currency — transactions (specifically URL requests) associated with users’ buying and selling on the site — and created a slew of metrics that measure how efficiently it delivers those transactions in terms of revenue, performance, cost and carbon footprint.

The project has been about 18 months in the making, Nelson told me during a recent phone call, and eBay was finally able to set a baseline measurement of its performance in 2012. Now that it knows what’s in place and how its infrastructure performs over the course of a year, the goal in 2013 is to cut its computing-related carbon usage and costs by 10 percent and increase performance in terms of transactions per kilowatt-hour by 10 percent.

In order to meet these goals, he said, every member of the technical team — from facilities managers to software engineers — has be striving toward them and also be cognizant of how turning their “knobs” will affect the other metrics eBay is measuring. “Think of it like a Rubik’s cube,” Nelson explained. “You can solve one side but screw up the rest of them.”

eBay plans to release quarterly updates on its progress along with its earnings reports, but employees will have access to down-to-the-second visibility into what’s going on. “It makes it personal for them,” Nelson said. “They can see what their efforts mean.”

52,075 servers doing a lot of work

Nelson offered some pretty compelling examples of how the Digital Service Efficiency project works in practice. If the goal is to decrease cost per transactions, data center engineers might try to minimize power usage at the facility level while server engineers might look to lower-power gear or better utilization on existing gear. They essentially reduce the denominator in that equation “and the net result is we should make more money from those transactions,” he said.

In one real-world instance, a software engineer tweaked some code that affected how much memory an application requires and the company was able to eliminate 400 servers. That cut energy usage by 1 megawatt and a $2 million savings in capital expense when the time would have come to refresh those servers.

eBay also has created a “list of fame” and a “list of shame” that highlight the 1,000 best- and worst-utilized servers within the company. “We have a hit list,” Nelson said, and it’s going to examine the bottom 20 percent to figure out why they’re as wasteful as they are.

However, he added, it’s important to remember on the server front that improving cost, performance and carbon usage doesn’t always mean buying lower-power gear. If eBay can improve the power density of its racks using technology such as liquid cooling — something its Project Mercury data center in Phoenix is pre-equipped for — it can handle more transactions on less gear. It already has some racks running at a sustained rate of 35 kilowatts and thinks it can push that up to 50 kilowatts, Nelson said.

Clean transactions with solar panels and Bloom boxes

On the carbon front, eBay has nothing but an open field in front of it thanks to some big clean-energy projects set to go live in 2013 in its new Salt Lake City, Utah, data center called Project Topaz. For starters, it’s using Bloom Energy boxes as the primary power source, which mean a slightly higher cost per transaction, but also a 13 percent reduction in carbon emissions and increased reliability (downtime costs eBay a lot of money).

Also, the company has finally cleared some regulatory hurdles to tie an on-site solar array back to the grid. Because of changes to a Utah law that eBay lobbied for, it’s about to start sourcing off-site clean energy for its data centers, as well.

“That is a corporate priority,” Nelson said. “We want to create the cleanest commerce engine on the freakin’ planet.”

Trying to change an industry

Of course, the Digital Service Efficiency methodology isn’t the only attempt by a major data center operator to show the world how efficient it is. Google publishes annual Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) ratings for its data centers, and Facebook occasionally does as well. On Monday, Salesforce.com released a statement underscoring its commitment to sourcing renewable energy.

However, Nelson pointed out, what eBay is doing — and encouraging others to do — is more transparent in that it gives a lot more depth about operations, including the company’s server count. Even if companies don’t publish their results, tying operational efficiency to other business objectives should have a positive effect on the bottom line and the environment, regardless. Every company will have its own base currency, Nelson explained, and they’ll have to find their own metrics to measure and figure out what are the knobs that each part of the company can turn to meet goals.

“We all have the same challenges, the same things to solve for, but we have numerous ways to solve it,” Nelson said. …”[Their implementations] may change completely, but the point is the conversation is starting.”

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That’s about the most disingenuous and manipulative piece of advertising I’ve seen in years (about as bad as its Coal Can Do That site). While power grid and utility execs are still looking into what caused the blackout at the Superdome, there are much more likely causes of the blackout than a reduction of coal use including faulty grid architecture (feeder line from an external substation), issues with Superdome power architecture, or even the highly speculative discussions of grid hacking that were ample on Twitter during the blackouts. (Note, Peabody isn’t actually saying the blackout was caused but a reduction of coal use, but just weirdly slaps the two together).

The use of coal for electricity in the U.S. has been reducing and will continue to reduce. Natural gas for electricity is the new hotness — it’s cheap, provides power 24/7, and is cleaner than coal — and wind power was actually the largest source of new generation in the U.S. in 2012. That wind stat was a record, by the way. Of course, having a massive coal business, Peabody doesn’t like this shift in energy generation, so it creates advertising campaigns that look to promote coal.

It’s a sad approach, really. I would say this to Peabody: you can’t turn around a fundamental shift in energy technology by these types of PR methods. The only thing that will shore up the loss of the coal business is investment in new energy technologies.

Yes, you claim to be doing so with “clean coal” technologies, but clean coal tech at this point is far less commercially viable than natural gas, wind, solar and energy efficiency technologies. If you look at the winners and losers throughout the history of the business world, the same type of technology shifts have led to changes like brick and mortar booksellers and video rental companies going out of business in the face of their online counterparts (Borders, Barnes and Nobles, Blockbuster), or telecom companies going under by not embracing wireless technology and the Internet.

No one would argue that coal provides one of the cheapest and most reliable forms of energy. But the environmental ramifications — both greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and dangerous work conditions — of coal are also well known. Coal is a non-renewable source and many of the coal plants in the U.S. are using very old technology. Natural gas is cleaner and also, like coal, can be used around the clock (wind and solar only provide power at certain times of day). And now with its low cost, it’s not surprising that utilities are turning to it now in droves. (Though, yes natural gas is non-renewable also).

As clean power — truly emissions free — becomes more mainstream, it’ll take over more of that new generation, too. Peabody, please join the modern technology age.

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As Cleantech Group CEO Sheeraz Haji put it in a call with the media: the sector saw “a significant drop off.” That was caused by a variety of issues in 2012, including cheap natural gas (which makes solar and wind projects less economical), the commoditization of solar modules (which makes VCs less willing to invest in solar manufacturing innovation), and global government uncertainty, as many clean energy technologies have relied on government support to be competitive.

Haji also said that the sector has experienced “a cleantech cliff” of sorts, given that clean energy received so much support through the U.S. government recovery package, and will not likely see that same type of government support in the near future. In addition, the cleantech sector is suffering through its own startup and investor crisis as companies, entrepreneurs and investors have been burned by funding companies that required more capital and more time than expected, said Haji.

However, Haji said he is still bullish on the opportunities for innovations for some sectors like energy efficiency, clean web, water, agriculture, bio chemicals, and more. “A foundation has been built,” over the past few years in cleantech and that will grow in value,” he said.

But if you’re going to brave either building a cleantech startup, joining a cleantech company or investing in cleantech startups, here’s 5 things you definitely should not do:

1). No more capital intensive plays: Investors that put money into cleantech in 2012 put less money into individual cleantech startups. The average round size raised by a cleantech startup was $10.9 million in 2012, down from $14.4 million in 2011. The average Series B round size for a cleantech startup in 2012 was $16.3 million, down from $20.8 million in 2011. The average early stage round for a cleantech startup in 2012 was $2.7 million, down from $4.6 million in 2011. The days of startups raising hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding for electric cars, electric car infrastructure, thin-film solar materials or new battery technologies is largely over (some exceptions remained in 2012).

2). Stay away from new solar materials and manufacturing: According to the Cleantech Group, investment in solar technology innovation represented almost 40 percent of all of the VC dollars that went into cleantech in 2008. In 2012, solar technology represented about 12 percent. As solar modules become commoditized, it’s hard to create innovation on a material and manufacturing level. Again, some companies are still doing this, but it’s just a lot more difficult.

3). Don’t rely on a cleantech IPO: O.K. SolarCity made it out in 2012, but over 2012 there were ten VC-backed cleantech IPOs that were pulled, according to the Cleantech Group. Even in China, which previously has been a hot clean energy IPO market, there were real challenges in 2012, said Haji. Don’t expect 2013 to get all that much better.

4). Corporate investors aren’t the savior: Now that VCs are pulling back from cleantech investing, a common mantra in the industry is to say that corporate investing is really ramping up. But according to the Cleantech Group, corporate investing — from the likes of GE, BP, Shell, Siemens etc — also dropped off significantly in 2012. Corporate investors put $31 million into cleantech startups in the fourth quarter of 2011, and that dropped to $26 million in Q1 2012, $24 million in Q2 2012, $20 million in Q3 2012, and $18 million in Q4 2012.

5). For new early stage cleantech companies, VCs are probably not your best bet: Not many VCs are doing investments in early stage — brand spanking new — cleantech deals any more. There’s a few, but they are the outliers. While cleantech investors back 344 early stage deals in 2011, only 282 early stage cleantech deals took place in 2012. On the other hand, if you can market your company not as a cleantech company, that’s a better way to get some VC dollars.

Image courtesy of huskyte77.

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That has yet to happen. SolarCity didn’t respond to requests for comment.

While it’s unclear why SolarCity delayed pricing and going public tomorrow, it could be because it wasn’t able to price its shares in the expected range of $13 to $15 that it wanted. The Mercury reports that SolarCity is “likely to reduce the price of shares below its original range.”

A report in MarketWatch this afternoon said that SolarCity was “facing headwinds” as it prepared to price in its targeted range. Discussions are around $10 per share among underwriters, says MarketWatch. An underwriter quoted in a DowJones VentureWire report says that SolarCity could try to price its shares on Wednesday.

If the delay is long, and the price per share is significantly lower than its range, the news would be a bummer for solar and cleantech stock watchers. The long planned IPO is seen as a bellwether for how Wall Street feels about clean energy and cleantech prospects.

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SolarCity’s per share range was priced at $13 and $15 per share at the end of November, and at the midpoint of that range SolarCity could raise $141 million in an IPO. Musk already said that he’ll buy $15 million of the stock.

Solar industry watchers had the same questions for solar thermal BrightSource Energy, which was planning to IPO back in April of this year. But BrightSource ended up pulling its IPO plans days before the debut as it didn’t get the pricing valuation that it wanted. The company later raised a large round of money from existing investors instead of turning to the public markets.

But SolarCity is very different from BrightSource Energy. While BrightSource is building large solar power plants in the deserts and selling the power to utilities, SolarCity is providing installation and financing to put solar panels on rooftops. The advantages of its business model and markets are that:

1). The price of solar panels is at a historic low.

2). Much of its business is around providing financing to cover the upfront cost of panels. There’s not much technology risk there.

Though, there are still some open questions in SolarCity’s future. GigaOM Pro’s Adam Lesser points out that SolarCity’s business model is based on maintaining two things that could face an uncertain future:

1). A low cost of capital: SolarCity has already raised $1.57 billion in “tax equity” funds to fund solar installations, where investors put up cash and in return receive the 30 percent tax credit that the federal government provides for renewable energy projects. But those incentives could easily be cut in the coming years, and then the company needs to find low cost capital elsewhere.

2). Cheap natural gas: Lesser also points out that “if natural gas maintains its incredibly cheap pricing, then the market could get more difficult for SolarCity.” SolarCity depends on utility rates being higher for its customers than the electricity prices it can offer through solar systems. If super cheap natural gas used in power plants by utilities actually lowers electricity prices, that could mess with SolarCity’s markets.

In addition, there’s these other risks I wrote about this year — 5 things to know about SolarCity’s IPO, and it’s not all good.

But if SolarCity does manage to debut in its expected range, it would represent one of the rare venture-backed cleantech IPOs that have emerged over the years. SolarCity is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DBL Investors, Generation Investment Management and Musk. Much of this crew — DBL, DFJ and Musk — also took electric car maker Tesla public, which was another one of those rare cleantech IPOs. Maybe entrepreneurs and investors should just copy what these guys do.

A new publicly-traded solar company could help prove that there are smart investments and sizable exits for those entrepreneurs and investors that bet on the right side of the economic trends in cleantech. Solyndra and many of the next-gen solar manufacturers out there bet on the price of silicon going up and now are struggling (or not around anymore). In actuality the price of silicon dropped, making solar panels super cheap, so if your business model — like SolarCity’s — is based on that cost curve, there’s money to be made.

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This move, to have clean energy directly power a data center, has always been in the plans. Google’s former green energy czar Bill Weihl (now at Facebook) told me years ago that the ultimate end game was for Google to procure clean energy to use for its data centers. But the search engine giant needed to find the right area, the right utility partner and a new(ish) data center project.

That sweet spot was a data center built in Mayes County, Oklahoma in 2011. Earlier this year Google started working with utility Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) to buy 48 MW of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project in Oklahoma. Google says it paid a premium (higher than the basic cheap power it could get elsewhere) to purchase the wind power from the project. As Greenpeace points out, half of Oklahoma’s power grid is run on coal.

Google says the GRDA approached it about buying power from the wind project in early 2012 to sell to Google. The wind project is GRDA’s first clean power project. We need more utilities like this that are willing to work with big customers that want to buy clean power. Most power customers, other than some of the leading Internet companies, aren’t aggressively looking for clean power and willing to pay a premium for it.

Most of the massive Internet companies are building their data centers in locations where power is cheap and reliable. And usually that means fossil fuel power — coal or natural gas — and sometimes means hydro power. The exception is areas like Iceland, which have geothermal and hydro in spades, so can provide cheap, reliable clean power. The Chief Technology Officer of Verne Global, Tate Cantrell, will be speaking at our Structure Europe event next month.

This is one of the first times I’ve heard of a data center operator buying a substantial amount of clean power from a utility project for a premium. So kudos to Google for that.

Greenpeace released a statement about Google’s clean power data center news:

Google’s announcement today shows what the most forward-­‐thinking, successful companies can accomplish when they are serious about powering their operations with clean energy.

Hopefully this is just the first of such announcements from Google.

Google fundamentally believes that it should work with utilities to buy clean power. In contrast other Internet companies like Apple are opting to build their own clean power. Apple is building a massive solar panel farm (through developer SunPower), and a large biogas-powered fuel cell farm (from Bloom Energy), next to its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. Auction site eBay is also building a huge fuel cell farm at one of its data centers.

The leading Internet companies are just starting to dabble in experimenting with clean power. The vast majority are still opting for low cost, reliable power, which usually means going where the grid is powered by fossil fuels. Power and data centers is still controversial — check out the New York Times recent story on that, as well as my opinion on that story. Also read my feature story on the controversial world of clean power and data centers.

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Clinton has been focusing on the issues of climate change and resource depletion for at least 32 years, he said. In 1977, when he was Attorney General of Arkansas, he said he once brought Amory Lovins to come speak before the public utility commission about how energy efficiency could help prevent the construction of another nuclear plant.

But post-Presidency Clinton has done an even deeper dive into the subject of clean energy and energy efficiency, and is promoting support of these industries through his foundation and through speaking opportunities (like this one). Energy efficiency is the lowest hanging fruit, said Clinton, emphasizing that “We [the U.S.] have not made a serious attempt to take energy efficiency to scale.” Energy efficiency has the ability to create the most jobs for the investment, said Clinton.

After energy efficiency, Clinton said solar is the next clear opportunity. Solyndra failed because the Chinese came in with billions in subsidies and even bankrupted some of its own domestic solar firms, said Clinton. Clinton also sang the praise of waste to energy technology, saying he wanted more waste to energy technologies to be used in areas like Mumbai.

Clinton did have some ideas for how to help solve the clean energy problem and potentially break the log jam of bipartisan politics. “If every state had a renewable energy mandate it would be much easier to get clean power installed, said Clinton. Tax credits are always good in this area, he said during the Q&A.

Other theories were a little more offbeat. Clinton said he was impressed with all of the visible tattoos of the 2,000 plus construction workers on the site of Ivanpah, and said this made him ponder how if there were people with visible impressive tattoos that advocated and understood clean energy, then there would be more success for the clean energy industry in Washington D.C. Think of the tattoo vote.

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NewWorld Capital Group previously raised $170 million and has made two investments in diesel emissions limiter Cleaire Advanced Emissions Controls, and energy efficiency AC producer, Coolerado. This year NewWorld Capital Group plans to raise at least $300 million more with a goal to do 8-12 deals, at $30-50 million each. I caught up with Bales late on a Friday afternoon to discuss his investment principles, which include the 6 angels and 6 devils of environmental investing, and a 4-plank strategy to fix our global problems. Also don’t ever call him a cleantech investor (at least not to his face).

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity).

Q). When we first met, we talked about the six angels and the six devils of environmental-oriented investing. What are the angels?

A). The six angels characterize the attractiveness of the environmental opportunities sector. We invest in energy efficiency, clean energy, water resources and reclamation, waste-to-value, and environmental services. The six angels are the six things that make these sectors attractive:

1). It’s already big. It’s over 300 billion in the U.S. alone, middle market.

2). It’s growing at 2-4 times GDP, among the fastest growing sectors in the U.S. economy. Rapid growth is a beautiful thing.

3). A substantial amount of innovation is going on in the market, some of it driven by all the money that went into venture capital in the last decade, some driven by simply technology or regulatory push.  Innovation is a beautiful thing because it creates more diversity in the market and less competitive intensity.

4). Diversity. The cyclicality of the sector will be far less because the end industries that are driving the segments we invest in are very diverse. You’re not going to see the problem that many investors fear, which is investing in a sector fund and the whole sector goes into decline or cyclic downturn.

5). A lot of complexity. It strongly favors the prepared mind or the expert, and tends to keep the generalists journalists at the door. You’re going to get less copycat behavior.

6). It’s undercapitalized. When you track all the firms that play in this big sandbox, the venture firms kind of grew up small with the exception of Kleiner and a few others, but basically they grew up supporting computer software innovation, which are first cost businesses and you can revolutionize the whole market. In our industry, these companies are kind of capital hungry so they require growth capital to get to scale.

Q). And what are the six devils that you’re trying to avoid in all your investments?

1). Technology risk. We’re not a venture firm and we’re not a cleantech firm. We will not take physics risk or science risk. It isn’t just whether the product works or the technology works, it’s whether you can scale the manufacturing without getting a lot of risk. That’s a golden rule around here.

2). We will not take on hydrocarbon pricing risk. We don’t invest in renewables because we don’t take hydrocarbon pricing risk. Renewables rely on high hydrocarbon prices, and hydrocarbon prices are highly subsidized. They’re asking us to compete against it with virtually no subsidies, and the subsidies being so temporary that you don’t have any policy stability. It’s better to just avoid all that stuff.

3). We don’t want to take capital scale risk. We don’t want to write big checks. We’d rather write more small checks. We’d rather do follow-on investing, milestone-based investing, rather than take a big first cost by writing a big first check.

4). We do not take on foreign competitor risk. If China really wants something bad, they’ll throw large amounts of commoditizing capital at it to drive down value and ultimately win on volume.

5). Business scaling risk. We accept it but we want to mitigate it as much as possible. We’re prepared to actually do that and be deeply involved in helping these companies grow, but we want to be paid damn well for doing that because it is a real risk. One of my complaints about the venture world is that by betting on technologies, they run the risk of hanging one man twice. They have to have a technology risk work out to their benefit. And then after that they have to take the business scaling risk. We’re prepared to take one of those risks.

6). Regulatory and subsidy risk. We’re perfectly happy to take advantage of a subsidy. But we will not base our investment case on the subsidy.

Q). Do you think technology risk is a job for the venture capital industry or should that function shift primarily to government programs, like ARPA-E?

A). It depends totally on the nature of the business. If the business requires enormous scale to function and it’s competing against an established hydrocarbon based business that’s fat with subsidy, then you do need government participation. These are very often second mover businesses. The first mover breaks the sword.

Let’s take CCS [carbon capture and storage] for example. CCS patent protection is not going to help very much. You’ve got so much social resistance to running a CO2 pipeline near somebody’s backyard. You’ve got a long, long process of educating the regulators and getting the permits. The first mover very often get’s screwed. The second mover comes in and buys the assets cheaper, discounts the first mover, and earns a respectful return.  Patent protection isn’t a very good protection, and you want to make sure that there’s some return for the risk taken by the first mover. If it’s a true capital scale business, then government has a role to play.

If it doesn’t require a big investment like carbon capture and storage, then it probably doesn’t require ARPA-E or whatever. Venture investment ought to be adequate.  But venture firms, as you know, can’t write really large checks.

The government isn’t particularly good at picking winners. But there are energy innovations that are needed where there is significant technology risk for which the venture industry is not fully fitted. You go to places like GE and so forth — rich corporations. Most of them don’t want to take that kind of chance around technology risk. They’d rather buy a company that’s successfully dealt with it, that’s been able to surmount a specific technology challenge. They might be very interested in simply purchasing it and getting ten years of learning in one transaction.

Q). What is the fundraising environment right now for cleantech, and has the politicization of the DOE loan program and concerns about returns for the sector, impacted your ability to raise money?

A). I think the environment for raising money for cleantech is reasonably negative. We’re not a cleantech investor so we’re not raising money for cleantech because cleantech implies technology risk. The reason cleantech has disappointed investors is a little bit of excessive exuberance and that tech risk is very often resolved on the wrong side of the equation. Or the cleantech investment works out okay but then doesn’t get the growth capital to reach commercial scale, and kind of dies on the vine.

I think cleantech generally is in under a cloud, made that way in part frankly by the tendency of venture firms to get into this field and then many of them welcome social media and they’ve got another girl to take to the dance. The secret of success is constancy of purpose. There hasn’t been as much of that in the venture world as perhaps is needed. I think it’s important for growth capital investors like us who won’t take technology risk to make that clear to investors early on.

I think we’re getting really good reception in the fundraising market.  We have a very experienced team, very operational, no investment bankers at all. A lot of people believe this could be to the next ten years what information technology was to the 90′s, a lot of very strong slow primary demand growth.

Q). In 2010 you gave a talk at the Imagine Solutions Conference, in which you opened by discussing discouraging figures related to the global environment — 90 percent of large ocean food fish are gone and unrecoverable, 50 percent of tropical forests have now been cut down, the U.S. is 5 percent of the world population but produces 25 percent of global CO2 emissions. How do you maintain hope and how does being an environmentally oriented investor figure in your worldview.

A). By nature I’m an optimist and in the broader world situation I’m a reluctant pessimist. I think the future of the world is in dire shape.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t really interesting business opportunities in the near and intermediate term. And the inefficiencies, resource exhaustion, all these other factors, they do offer commercial opportunities. What we’re trying to do here is earn a maximum bottom line for investors not because we’re greedy but because we realize without that, you won’t grow private capital for these problems. And without private capital for these problems, you won’t solve them. Government has neither the policy consistency or the resources to solve them. We have to show the way, that private capital can productively flow into these problems and earn a competitive return. I’m quite optimistic that there are significant opportunities.

Q). What would an ideal solution look like? In an ideal world where you could intervene in the market, what would that intervention look like?

A). There would be four planks to a solution — you need all four.

1). The first plank is intelligent regulation and some economic incentives to go after energy efficiency. Forty percent of the solution lies in buildings and the appliances that operate in buildings. Buildings leak energy and appliances consume excess energy. You’re not going to fix that without regulation. California has kept per capita electricity pretty constant over the last quarter century. Whereas the U.S. overall is up 28 percent per capita and Texas is up around 46 percent per capita, showing Texas is a massively energy inefficient state.

2). Turn carbon into a factor cost — that’s clearly needed. Whether it’s done through a tax on carbon or a cap and trade, whether the tax on carbon generates revenue to retire the public debt that gets distributed back to the public itself, you could argue but it doesn’t really matter. You must turn carbon into a factor cost despite the myth that the right wing has sold the nation that doing so would harm jobs.

3). Selective government assistance to help technologies reach commercial scale where they can compete against heavily subsidized carbon alternatives. CCS is an example of something the market could never develop. If you’re ever going to get smart and begin to build your nuclear portfolio, you’re going to need significant amounts of government funding, if for no other reason than taking 15 years to build a nuclear plant, including permitting, suggests it’s not a commercially plausible private investment.

4). Reverse the negative trend in the U.S. carbon sink. There’s a major opportunity in restoration conservation to protect more natural land. We really need to have our own carbon sink as an offset to greenhouse gas emissions. That’s actually a very cost effective opportunity, pretty simple to do.

Q). From a personal perspective, how did you get interested in climate change? You started at McKinsey, how did environmental concerns shift to your professional life?

A). Everybody to some extent, but maybe me to a greater extent, has a connection to nature. I’ve been deeply connected to nature. I can see over the longer term what’s happening. It doesn’t take much to wake up one day and realize that everything that’s been done by the Nature Conservancy over the last 50 years—and they’ve saved well more than a single Switzerland inside the U.S. domain—and all of that is going to be destroyed by climate change. When climate change first came to my consciousness in 2004, because I was asked to give a talk about it over at the U.N., it dawned on me pretty quickly that this was going to destroy much of what I held to be really dear, which is the functioning and the outlook of the biodiversity in the natural world. Once I reached that conclusion, I got very concerned and very active. The world has never seen a challenge like this where the cost of acting on it is now and the penalty of not acting on it is tomorrow.

UPDATE: New World Capital reached out to say that it’s targeting deals in a broader range, from about $15 to $40 million.

Image courtesy of Svenstorm.

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