Bay Area's future in green tech, Mendonca says

Q: You always hear about the Bay Area ties to the Pacific Rim. Give our readers some concrete examples of the Bay Area economy benefiting from a boost in the Chinese economy?

A: Sure. A lot of the technology companies in the valley benefit from the fact that their intellectual capital is being exported in ways that can help build businesses in China and support growth there.

For instance, the Bay Area Council is co-hosting a couple of events in Shanghai and Beijing in November that are really oriented toward trying to build the scientific and commercial connections between the regions, particularly focused on environmental technology.

The opportunity to help solve some of the world's substantial environmental and climate-related issues is a shared interest between the two countries and the two regions. And so there's a fair amount of interest in trying to help bring creative, technology-oriented solutions to help ensure that China continues to grow, but does so in a productive way in terms of their use of energy and the carbon-intensity of that growth.

And that's what I think is the most interesting intermediate and long-term connection. The Chinese economy needs to continue growing but they also need to do it in a way that uses less oil and has less carbon emitted as result. And the Bay Area, in particular, has technologies that could be very beneficial to the Chinese.

Q: So do you think there's a danger now that our economy's sliding, the Chinese economy could go with it? And could that hurt the Bay Area in the long run?

A: Well, I think there's no doubt that we're slowing down and that has an influence on Chinese growth. But the bulk of Chinese growth is Chinese domestic growth. It's hard to see how the Chinese economy won't continue to grow and at a much faster rate than the U.S. or the Bay Area's.

More than half of the growth in the world in the next decade under almost any scenario is going to come from developing markets. The U.S. is still going to be the largest aggregate growth, so the health of the U.S. economy matters a lot. But the growth in developing markets, particularly China and India, where the Bay Area has a close connections, is really, really important.

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