Last week’s World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen drew more than 500 executives from cleantech firms, utilities and some of the world’s largest corporations, as well as top envoys for the upcoming international climate talks to be held in the city this December. VantagePoint Venture Partners CEO and Managing Partner Alan Salzman joined the gathering as an “ambassador for Silicon Valley,” he told us in an interview after the event, and he came away with a generally positive outlook on how policy is shaping up.

　　Salzman said he saw it as his job at the summit to “bring a sense of optimism to the party” and put “mundane Silicon Valley activities front and center.” He explained that meant representing the innovation arm within the private energy sector for an audience that doesn’t necessarily think about the business community with the same degree of granularity — a big utility and small startup, he said, seemed to fall under the same big umbrella for many of his fellow summit-goers.

　　Salzman said he carried around an LED bulb and spoke about some of VantagePoint’s investments (the firm’s portfolio includes Tesla Motors, Adura Technologies, Better Place, BrightSource Energy and Miasole) to make the innovation sector and its potential to transform industries more tangible.

　　“If we say over the next 20 years that all vehicles are going electric, it can be a daunting-sounding undertaking,” Salzman said. According to Salzman, “That sounds like magic to someone at an intergovernmental agency in a part of the world that doesn’t have an innovation sector.”

　　Looking back on the transformation of communication that has taken place since the early 1990s, he said, transforming transportation “seems a lot easier.” Salzman offered Tesla as an example of how startups and entrepreneurs can help spur changes in a legacy industry. He said the company showed how “using off-the-shelf technology, you could make the electric car that auto companies said wasn’t possible.”

　　While the group at last week’s meeting agreed on six business-friendly steps for a global climate deal, Salzman noted two points of relative disharmony at the summit, both likely to come up again in Copenhagen. One is “the role of the private sector, let alone the entrepreneurial subset of the private sector,” in relation to government. A second hurdle for negotiators will come from the question of how to deploy cleantech innovations in developing economies, an issue that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has said will make the Copenhagen talks the “IP battle of the year.”