Al Gore could become world's first carbon billionaire

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...d-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html

Al Gore could become world's first carbon billionaire
Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world's first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.

Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.

The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy as Mr Gore. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming sceptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world's first "carbon billionaire," profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, has claimed that Mr Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.

"Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?" Mr. Gore said. "I am proud of it. I am proud of it."

 

Scam, first and foremost. The voters get scammed, too, when someone with pull with the party in power (no pun intended) gets grants for the companies they invest in. Especially companies that would fail miserably without govt. money.

 

Since you asked...

Nowhere is green energy a net gain. The places where it's been deployed the most have all been heavily subsidized by governments, and even those governments have felt the pinch of pouring money into a black hole.

I think there were a lot of factors that led to the economic downturn last year, not just the banks. In fact, the banking problems were a bubble of sorts and nobody really talks about what popped the bubble... How about heavy ethanol subsidies raising food prices world-wide (since we feed a lot of the world)? Combine those increased prices with high gasoline prices ($3/gallon) and it put a lot of families in a position of choosing food/gas over mortgage payments. And certainly if mortgage payments were ARM type and went up, it made things worse.

If you think about it, the banks could have 100% of their mortgages into horrible loans and survive and thrive. The key is that the people who have those loans can afford the payments, and I don't see why people wouldn't want to make the payments on the homes they own.

 

I didn't intend to make it about mortgages, just about the pinch everyone feels when govt. spends many $billions into black holes. And about the unintended consequences of that spending.

 

Our national electrical grid is very outdated. We are vulnerable to solar flares and terrorist attacks. Improving our electrical infrastructure is not a bad idea.

 

T Boone Pickens talked about spending health care sized money (meaning it would be a choice of one vs. the other) to build out electrical grid infrastructure along with a massive windmill farm in the rockies. We'd need the new grid to get that power from the rockies elsewhere...

Seems like a good thing until you study the plan a bit and realize he's got huge investments in natural gas and driving spending into natural gas consumption is the actual plan.

The idea I proposed, using that kind of money, would be to build out a bunch of nuclear power plants (cheap and clean power) and to subsidize fully electric cars that would charge from that power. The nuclear power would also lessen our need for burning coal or oil to generate electricity.

There's a reason we burn oil - it's really efficient. Well over 10x more efficient than solar or wind.

A coal burning plant the size of a city block generates more power than many square miles of solar panels out in the desert.

 

I have no problem with politicians holding investments. I do have a problem with them lobbying for the govt. to spend money that makes their investments pan out. Or any other kind of corporate welfare, for that matter...

 

I don't see any scamming here. Al's a private citizen, has been for 8 and a half years now. He can invest in whatever he likes.

He's also free to lobby the government for whatever he likes. He's hardly the first businessman to lobby the government for policies favorable to his business.

Unless one is proposing to outlaw all lobbying, it seems rather silly to even bring this up.

barfo

 

Except for the matter of the $billions of govt. grants that made their way into his investment portfolio companies, I agree with you.

 

First, it wasn't billions. Secondly, it's not illegal to lobby the government. In fact it is a huge industry. If you want to outlaw lobbying, that's fine, I might be in favor of that myself, but that really has nothing to do with Gore.

barfo