John Petersen

Commodities, Globality and the Next Billion Customers

In a recent presentation attended by Eric Wesoff of Greentech Media, clean-tech venture capitalist Vinod Khosla reportedly said, “500 million people on earth enjoy a lifestyle that 9 billion people will want in 2050.” Actually, it would be more accurate to say "6.2 billion people already know how the other 500 million live and every single one of them wants his piece of the dream." The trick will be finding a way to raise the standard of living in developing economies without crushing the standard of living in developed economies. For that to happen without catastrophic conflict and horrific environmental consequences, the world must find relevant scale solutions for persistent shortages of water, food, energy and virtually every commodity you can imagine.