Silicon Valley's Green Politics

With the election a few weeks away, a Who's Who of Silicon Valley's executive class is convening a "CEO Summit on Alternative Energy" Monday in San Jose. The confab is part of a campaign by a group called Silicon Valley Business Leaders for Alternative Energy to lobby Congress to reduce the United States' dependence on imported oil.

Here's what the group wants: federal incentives - read subsidies - to companies developing renewable energy technologies; policies to shield alt energy businesses from oil price flucations of the type that doomed the solar biz in the 1980s; promotion of flex-fuel cars capable of running on both gasoline and ethanol; and policies to encourage the development of plug-in flex-fuel hybrid electric cars and "practical" all-electric cars.

So far about 30 Silicon Valley CEOs - including the chiefs of Advanced Micro Devices, Juniper Networks, Palm and SanDisk - have signed the group's open letter calling for such an agenda. Of course it goes without saying that Silicon Valley is experiencing a green energy boom, with big investments in biofuels and solar power on the line. Fair enough, given that Big Oil has certainly played the politics-and-tax-break game to its multibillion-dollar advantage for well high on a century.

Monday's event at Novellus Systems will feature about 200 execs, academics, policy wonks and politicos like California Senator Dianne Feinstein.