Blood & Gore: ‘War on Carbon’ Profiteers
Investor’s Business Daily
Global Warming: At the cap-and-trade hearings, it was revealed that not everyone will suffer from this growth-killing energy tax. A congresswoman wanted to know why sea levels aren’t rising but Gore’s bank account is.
When Gore left office in January 2001, he was said to have a net worth in the neighborhood of $2 million. A mere eight years later, estimates are that he is now worth about $100 million. It seems it’s easy being green, at least for some.
Gore has his lectures and speeches, his books, a hit movie and Oscar, and a Nobel Prize. But Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., was curious about how a man dedicated to saving the planet could get so wealthy so quickly. She sought out investment advice we all could use in a shaky economy.
Al Gore joined the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers September of 2007. On May 1, 2008, the firm announced a $500 million investment in maturing green technology firms called the Green Growth Fund.
Gore was the star witness at the hearings on cap-and- trade legislation before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Blackburn asked Gore about Kleiner-Perkins, noting that at last count they “have invested about a billion dollars invested in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation that we are discussing here today.”
Blackburn then asked the $100 million question: “Is that something that you are going to personally benefit from?” Gore gave the stock answer that “the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it but every penny that I have made I have put right into a nonprofit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to spread awareness of why we have to take on this challenge.”
Gore, while speaking at a conference in Monterey, Calif., admitted to having “a stake” in green investments that he recommended attendees put money in rather than “subprime carbon assets” such as tar sands and shale oil.
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