Can cleantech save the planet ... and us?

Outside of the dismal finance situation at the moment, the daily news from the world of cleantech tends to sound overwhelmingly positive: Researchers here have made a breakthrough that could lead to super-batteries. Scientists there have found a way to potentially produce hydrogen fuel cheaply and easily. A startup here is working to engineer bacteria that can pump out biofuels. An initiative there plans to plaster the Sahara with solar cells and generate enough power for all of Europe.

In the face of such dire news on the environmental side — climate change, biodiversity loss, water shortages, peak oil — cleantech seems like a soothing balm, a reassuring antidote that promises all our scariest looming problems will shortly be solved.

But will they?

In reality, cleantech advances don’t result in commercial-scale, affordable and widely adopted technologies as frequently as we might believe. Sure, new and innovative technology makes it to the marketplace on a daily basis, mostly in the form of electronic gadgets such as iPhones, Kindle readers, iPods and Wiis. But how many people in your neighborhood drive electric cars or produce their own energy via wind turbines, neither of which are exactly hot-off-the-press clean technologies? How much longer will it take before hydrogen, carbon capture and artificial photosynthesis are household technologies?

Does this fall into “the trap of underestimating society’s capacity to meet future fuel challenges through innovation and conservation,” which was Newsweek’s critique of Canadian analyst Jeff Rubin’s new book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller? Or is doomer-engineer Dmitri Orlov right when he says, “I know roughly how long it takes to innovate: come up with the idea, convince people that it is worth trying, try it, fail a few times, eventually succeed, and then phase it in to real use. It takes decades. We do not have decades. We have already failed to innovate our way out of this.”?

We’re playing devil’s advocate here and would like to know what you think: Can cleantech save the planet in time or not?