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Al Gore, who famously claimed to have invented the Internet,
now denies –in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary— that he
is in a position to make an immense fortune from global
warming-mitigation efforts. Ian Wilhelm, a Chronicle of Philanthropy reporter, asked the private equity firm Generation Investment Management LLP (GIM) to respond to my latest post, The Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering.
In the post, I noted that Gore’s nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection plans to spend $300 million
on an advertising campaign aimed at convincing the American public that
they urgently need to embrace (economy-crippling) controls on carbon
emissions and press politicians to act. Gore happens to be chairman and
founder of GIM, a firm that invests money from institutions and wealthy
investors in companies that are becoming environmentally-friendly, to
use green parlance.
Wilhelm received what certainly seems like a snotty response.
On behalf of Chairman Gore, GIM spokesman Richard Campbell said my
statements were a “nonsense story.” Campbell said neither Gore nor any
other members of GIM’s board will make a buck from the expansion of
carbon trading. “To suggest then that they are somehow benefiting from
the growth of this industry betrays a complete lack of knowledge of the
carbon offset industry,” Campbell said. But why on Earth wouldn’t Gore, as head of an investment firm focused on green products, want to make money from climate change mitigation efforts? It’s his job, and he is already deeply involved in the global warming business.
He has enjoyed great success in business and made oodles of money for
boldly seizing the initiative in a series of successful business
ventures, including green ventures. He now has a net worth greater than $100 million. As Fast Company notes:
He has made an enormous amount of money and achieved
positions of influence from technology to financial services to media.
He and Tipper are even setting themselves up as angel investors for a
few early-stage tech companies they believe in. In doing one end run
after another around the status quo, he has created a new life: a
perfect amalgam of environmental activism and a new type of capitalism
in which there is more than one bottom line to consider, more than one
master to serve.
Gore’s partner at GIM, David Blood, told
MarketWatch last year that “we really are focused on delivering
outstanding customer results for our clients. We’re also clear, avowed
advocates on climate change or on sustainability.” The article also
states that
Blood sees climate change creating an entirely new
business stratum, he said, similar to that surrounding the so-called
Internet economy -- though he'd prefer that it bypass the latter's
bubble phase."If you think about the challenges the world faces over
the next 25 years," Blood said, "these factors will be integral to how
business operates, and by extension how the media thinks about
challenges, how civil society thinks about challenges, and how we all
operate."
The way Blood and Gore are talking, they sure sound like they plan to make a lot of money off global warming.
And let’s not forget that Gore now makes $175,000 a speech. Are people paying Gore not
to talk about global warming, his policy forte, in his speeches? He
sure isn’t making that kind of money for his oratory by enthralling
crowds with fascinating tales from his time as Vice President of the
United States, an office a previous holder once described as not being worth “a bucket of warm p---.” By comparison, the rhetorical gifts of both Dan Quayle and Walter Mondale go for a more affordable $30,000 (per speech), or less.
Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his global warming
Chicken Little routine, is the most famous environmental activist in
the world. His (so-called) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, won two Academy Awards and was one of the highest-grossing documentary movies of all time, earning $49.7 million at the box office. Gore
is also America’s most prominent advocate for legislated carbon
emissions controls in the form of the so-called cap-and-trade system.
In a cap-and-trade system, the government creates by fiat an artificial
scarcity in the right to generate carbon emissions. The idea is that
there would be a fixed quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2) production
allowed and that businesses or industries that wanted to exceed their
allowance (in order to do the things that make them money) would have
to buy the unused portions of others’ allowances. These carbon credits
could be traded on an exchange, as is currently done in Europe.
When a financial instrument is traded in a market, people make money
off it, whether directly or indirectly – investors, sellers, brokers,
dealers, financial advisors – even investment executives like Al
Gore. As for carbon offsets, the U.S. market for such products and its
attendant “feel-good hype” could be “as high as $100 million…up from
next to nothing just a couple of years ago,” reports
Business Week. If you consider that global warming only arrived on the
scene as a major political issue relatively recently and that it may
remain an issue for years, possibly decades, to come, it appears we are
only at the beginning of what may turn out to be a long period of
global warming consciousness-raising (to borrow a phrase from the
left). If CO2 limits become the law of the land --as John McCain,
Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have all promised on the campaign
trail-- the market for carbon emissions rights will be huge as soon as
the restrictions are signed into law. Of course the market for carbon
offsets would probably grow exponentially.
There’s the article by Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, “Al Gore’s
next act: Planet-saving VC,” [VC stands for venture capitalist] that ran
in Fortune on February 12, 2008. The subtitle is “The recovering
politician is teaming with a legendary venture capitalist and bigtime
moneyman to make over the $6 trillion global energy business.” The
authors note that Gore has joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. That venture capital firm says right on its website’s homepage that:
KPCB is actively working with entrepreneurs to solve
our climate crisis. To accelerate our solutions, Al Gore has joined
KPCB as a Partner, and KPCB has formed an alliance with Gore's
Generation Investment Management. The combined network, expertise,
vision and global reach of Gore, Generation and KPCB will help our
entrepreneurs change the world.
So, KPCB has hopped on Gore’s potentially very lucrative global warming bandwagon. Did Gore get involved with KPCB to not
make money? The Fortune article implies that GIM has invested in carbon
trading companies: GIM “came across a small company engaged in carbon
trading that [KPCB] is analyzing, and [KPCB] has shared intelligence
about which startups could threaten the established companies in
[GIM]’s portfolio.”
Gore has incredibly ambitious plans for the people of Earth. He
wants to lead a revolution in how people and industry use energy and,
in his own words, is calling for something “bigger than the Industrial
Revolution and significantly faster.” Gore proclaims: “What we are
going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan
Project, the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan, and scale it
globally. It’d be promising too much to say we can do it on our own,
but we intend to do our part.”
So, Gore flaunts his prowess as a savvy investor-entrepreneur by
appearing in glossy business magazines, but when someone points out the
obvious, that his business interests and environmentalist crusade
overlap, he gets indignant? Source
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