reportonbusiness.com: Has the sun set on clean tech?

Once a booming industry thanks to sky-high oil prices, the feel-good trend, carbon reduction and subsidies, the financial crisis has pushed investors to give up on green energies, and like the dot-com bubble of 2000, some analysts say it's about to burst
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There is no longer any doubt: As far as investors are concerned, the sun has set on solar power, one of the hottest growth industries of the past decade.

“We are trading below book value even though we're quite pleased with what we've built,” said Arise founder and vice-chairman Ian MacLellan. “This market is numbing.”

Jim Buckee, the former CEO of Canada's Talisman Energy, thinks the clean-tech industry will revert to fringe status because it can't seem to thrive without government subsidies and because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, meaning the technologies can never fully replace coal, oil and nuclear plants.

“I think economic reality will kill the green industry,” said Mr. Buckee, who now lives in Britain and lectures on climate change.

Solar energy isn't alone in its woes. Wind, biomass, biofuel and other “clean-tech” companies are getting pasted too as the financial crisis sends investors fleeing from technology names, dries up credit and freezes the IPO market. The moribund equity markets are especially bad news for the green-energy players, who depend on a steady stream of equity from growth-obsessed investors to keep moving.

'Save The Environment'??? Puh-leeze: Let's Get Real - Green Computing Blog - InformationWeek

My fellow blogger Kevin Ferguson, who's doing excellent work on our Green Technology beat, recently ended a post with this jaw-dropper: "And perhaps that's what is needed to save the environment." Now, while I'm as fully committed as the next guy to the need for businesses to do a better job with more-sustainable sourcing, recycling, and energy conservation, we all need to severely ratchet down the rhetoric or else in our wildly misguided quest to "save the environment" we'll end up doing terrible damage.