Ticket Replay: Is Al Gore the world's first carbon billionaire?

As the holidays unfold, The Ticket's thoughts turn to a little undeserved time off. So we're re-publishing some of our favorite or most-read items from 2009. This item originally appeared on Nov. 3.

Former Vice President Al Gore has a new book out. Called "Our Choice," it argues that the technologies exist to clean up the climate if the political will can be mustered.

But conservative critics such as U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) are making the case that Gore, who has long had a passion on environmental issues, stands to profit personally from the energy and climate bills he is lobbying Congress to enact.

Today's New York Times takes a look at the issue, noting that Bill Clinton's vice president makes a lot of money from supporting green companies.The Democrat who lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush by a few hundred hanging chad ballots in Florida has apparently become the world's first carbon billionaire.

The founder of Generation Investment Management, Gore earns a partner’s salary Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. According to the Times, last year Kleiner Perkins loaned a California company, Silver Spring Networks, $75 million to produce hardware and software to improve electricity grid efficiency. Last week the deal paid off big time when the Energy Department announced $560 million in smart grid grants to Silver Spring utility clients.

The upshot: Gore and his partners could recover their investment many times over in coming years.

For his part, Gore says that he is just putting his money where his mouth is.

“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” he told the Times. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

-- Johanna Neuman

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Comments

[Jeremy Ulrich]

I don't see the problem with a person profiting from an investment. If more people invested with their heart, this would be a better place.

[Sam]

I must agree, reluctantly!, with Al Gore... I've been saying -- for YEARS now -- that the only way the United States will ever "go green" is if there's a way to make it profitable. Climate change is an inevitability and on the whole we have very little to do with it... But on the other hand, there's no denying that the atomic structure of LOTS of the things we use all the time does not happen in nature and does not break back down to what it was before some company crammed those things together. If it is both cheap for the consumer and profitable for the producers, green will happen and we shall be better for it. I can't blame anybody -- not even Al Gore, as much as I can't stand him and his rhetoric -- for putting their money where the economy is going. If I had the money to invest, I'd be doing it, too; it's a ground-floor opportunity to make some cash.

[Dr. Avery Wendell]

He's been retired from politics for a decade, what do they want him to do? Become a monk? It will be curious to see how outraged Rep. Blackburn is about former VP Cheney's investments now that he is out of office. When Rep. Blackburn is retired from politics (hopefully soon) will we see a post in this blog tracking what she is investing in ten years after she retires?

[Michele]

Jeremy,

You should use your brain, not your heart in this situation. Gore has been propagandizing children, college students and the gullible through his fraudulent science-filled film; is now pushing his climate hysteria as a religion via churches and universities (ie Yale Univ.)... he's indoctrinating people who will eventually be taxed and regulated by his very own software.

You have no problem with this fraud lying to the public for years about "global warming" at the our expense. He lives in a mansion, flies in a jet and lectures us how to live. He owns a freaking pollution spewing ore mine!

He's a huge hypocrite.

And, if you used your brain and not your heart you would know using taxpayer money to fund your greed isn't capitalism. Capitalism works on private income of consumers; not on the tax money of the weak and gullible - which we all are for not stopping this.

I'm hoping Jeremy is thirteen and just hasn't had any life experience. Otherwise, you're an incredibly naive adult.