“NERDS WILL invent the future,” declared Vinod Khosla in 2010. The venture capitalist was not talking about the sort of nerds responsible for e-commerce sites, marketplace apps or social-media platforms. Rather, his speech, delivered at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), was intended to inspire brilliant engineers and scientists to pursue climate-related innovation. The “clean tech” investment bubble had recently popped, so it then seemed an unsexy career option. But if top talent took on the hard engineering challenges involved, he argued, early commercial successes and rising public awareness would produce a “Netscape-like” moment, referring to the web browser which ushered in the consumer internet in the mid-1990s. “Ten
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