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March 10, 2008 
The federal government needs to spend far more on early stage research and development in order to solve global warming, said John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, at the UC Berkeley Energy Symposium on Friday.
"You have the attention of the venture-capital community," he said. "The fundamental thing we need is more R&D dollars. Universities and labs are dying for lack of these."
Doerr said half the students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to focus on this research and a third of the faculty wants to pursue it, but the entire federal R&D budget for it is $1 billion.
"I believe we need R&D that is really scalable to the size of this problem," he said, adding that President Bush’s total allocated to greentech research doesn’t equal even a day of ExxonMobile’s revenues. "The total research into geothermal last year was $5 million. It’s almost criminal that we’re not investing more in energy R&D."
After his keynote speech, Doerr told Greentech Media that the lack of fundamental research will have real impacts on the greentech industry.
"We need much, much more R&D than we have today," he said. "People who want to work in the field can’t. And innovations that are needed aren’t available."
In particular, it’s the "science of the small" -- whether it’s understanding the DNA of plants, engineering better energy crops, carbon nanotubes to improve solar cells or materials that lead to better energy-storage technologies -- that is missing in the government-funded part of the innovation pipeline, he said.
Aside from more federal research, Doerr called in his speech for policies that put a price on carbon, as well as a renewal of the investment tax credits set to expire at the end of this year.
He advocated both a market-priced carbon cap and a carbon tax to help change the way people think about emissions, and added that Congress is very close to having the votes needed to pass a cap-and-trade system, which would limit carbon emissions and set up an auction system to allow the trading of carbon credits.
The Lieberman-Warner bill, which proposes such a system, has moved out of a Senate committee for consideration by the full Senate (see New Climate Bill Could Boost Greentech and Global Warming Bill Takes Some Heat). Such a bill would likely need 60 votes to end a filibuster in the Senate.
"We always seem to have 59," Doerr said. "But I believe between a new president [and other changes], we will have a cap and trade."