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Gore Responds to NewsBusters,
Denies Global Warming His Meal Ticket
Matthew Vadum
News
Busters
Monday, April 7, 2008
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.
(Article continues below)
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?
(Note: A modified
version of this entry has been posted to the blog of my employer,
Capital Research Center.
Previously, a modified
version of “The
Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering”
was also posted to the Capital Research Center blog. For more
information on Gore’s environmentalist business schemes, see “Al
Gore’s Carbon Crusade: The Money and Connections Behind It,” by
Deborah Corey Barnes, Foundation
Watch, August 2007.)
Matthew Vadum is Editor of Organization Trends and Foundation
Watch at the Capital
Research Center.
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