By 2006, when An Inconvenient Truth won Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, renewables were becoming big business. That same year, the venture capitalist John Doerr, an early Google and Amazon investor, cried while giving a TED Talk about global warming. “I’m really scared,” Doerr said. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.” But the upside of crisis was opportunity. “Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,” Doerr said. “It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”84
