Morning Must-Read: Vinod Khosla on Clean Tech and on CBS’s 60 MInutes Taking a Dive

Vinod Khosla: Open Letter to 60 Minutes and CBS:

On January 5, 2014, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a segment titled, “The Cleantech Crash” that grossly misrepresented the state of the sustainable energy industry…. The pontificators at 60 Minutes, with their agenda-driven bastardization of news reporting, failed to do the most elementary fact checking and source qualification, as was the case with your Benghazi reporting. No wonder one major media outlet wrote that you have been “widely criticized for leaving out crucial information about the state of the clean tech sector.” Is this the new CBS standard?…. I have not invested over a billion dollars of my own money into cleantech… the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has created 55,000 new cleantech jobs… has a 97% success rate…. A substantial portion of DOE loans is allocated to nuclear… a fact conveniently left out despite your being aware of it…. The U.S. spent $502 billion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2011… [plus] $80 billion of taxpayer money was spent patrolling just the oil sea-lanes in the Arabian Gulf…. You fundamentally do not understand how innovation works…. To get to the energy-independent future we need, we must continue to try and sometimes fail, but the consequence for not trying is guaranteed failure. We will keep accepting intelligent and selective failure…

Yet another piece of evidence for the claim that if the staff of “60 Minutes” ever were real journalists, they are not such now–they merely play them on the TV…