A remarkable thing happened in Silicon Valley during the past decade. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs set their sights on clean energy as the Next Big Thing. They audaciously hoped to reinvent energy by harnessing the incredible innovation that had transformed information technology and biotechnology. Some of the best venture capitalists in the business, including my friends Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla, detached from their computing roots and focused on energy startups. The result was a stag

Since the government unveiled its “low carbon, green growth” vision in August 2008, the nation’s renewable energy industry has achieved impressive growth. Between 2007 and 2010, the industry’s aggregate sales jumped 6.5-fold, its export revenue surged 7.3-fold and the size of its workforce expanded 3.7-fold.The industry’s rapid growth prompted major Korean corporations to jump on the clean energy bandwagon. They announced large-scale investment plans one after another. This rush boosted expectat

Policymakers often cause confusion by announcing well-intended but not-fully-thought-out measures. A case in point is one of the measures announced Sunday by the Prime Minister’s Office to help baby boomers push back retirement. The office announced that the government would grant workers aged 50 and older the right to request reduced hours in the run-up to retirement and thereby extend employment.The PMO said the scheme was intended to help senior workers prepare for their new jobs after retire

In the end, Jon Corzine was little more than an unsupervised rogue trader. His disproportionately reckless $6.3 billion bet on the credit quality of a few European nations bankrupted MF Global Holdings Ltd. over the course of three dramatic days after the short-term credit markets quickly lost confidence in him and his firm. His gamble will cost MF’s shareholders and creditors billions of dollars and, virtually overnight, put the careers of MF’s almost 3,000 employees in jeopardy. MF Global now

President Barack Obama goes into the 2012 with a weak economy that may doom his reelection. But he has one asset that hasn’t received much attention: He’s honest. The sight of Texas Governor Rick Perry tumbling out of the clown car recently as a “birther” (or at least a birther-enabler) is a sign of weakness, not just for the Perry campaign but for the whole Republican effort to tarnish the president’s character. Although it’s possible that the Solyndra LLC story will become a classic feeding fr

Memorial services were held in Annapurna this week for Park Young-seok and his two younger colleagues, who went missing in the Himalayas. Korea lost another public hero, but the tragedy will not stop the legion of Korean men and women from continuing to challenge extreme conditions in the world’s highest peaks, deserts and polar regions. During the 1990s, Park and his rival climbers Um Hong-gil mounted a thrilling competition to scale all the highest mountains in the Himalayas. Park became the e

As Danica, one of the babies chosen by the United Nations to symbolize the 7 billionth person in the world, was crying at the bosom of her mother Camille in a maternity hospital in Manila, experts and government policy makers presented forecasts and countermeasures about the still fast-growing world population.It was in 1999 that then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan held an infant boy in Bosnia-Herzegovina in his arms to congratulate the 6 billionth birth to the world while at the same time is

Republican presidential candidates are foolishly jockeying to see who can be the harshest on undocumented immigrants.Michelle Bachmann has called for sealing the U.S.-Mexico border with a double wall. Not to be outdone, Herman Cain has called for an electrified fence backed by military personnel armed with live rounds (though he later said the electrified fence was a joke). And Rick Perry wants more drones in the sky.These positions reveal a cruel disregard for basic human rights and invite a ca

In the political and economic climate created by consistently high unemployment and shaken by the Occupy Wall Street movement, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on trends in U.S. household income had the effect of pouring kerosene on a bonfire. The report’s most striking finding, that “for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” led to apocalyptic predictions not just from those at Z