Doing Well By Doing Good, As A Private Citizen

With a cleverly buried lead, the Times reports that Al Gore is on track to becoming a "carbon billionaire" by putting his money where his mouth has been; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is playing the same game, but the Times buries that.  Here is the long distraction:

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a winner last year when a small California firm sought financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture capital firm where Mr. Gore is a partner.

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.

Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

Silver Spring Networks is a foot soldier in the global green energy revolution Mr. Gore hopes to lead. 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. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore 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 skeptics, 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, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

Mr. Gore says 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.”

I am sure Dick Cheney was proud of the work done by Halliburton in supporting American interests in Iraq and around the world, too.  And Michael Moore was a progressive rabble-rouser even before he became rich by being a progressive rabble-rouser.  This is a great country.

Gore is not a public official, thank heaven, so it is perfectly reasonable for him to back his ideas with his money.  What is not reasonable is the silence of the conflict of interest crowd that screams "cui bono" every time a righty does something like this. 

By way of contrast, Nancy Pelosi has a problem, as the Times eventually notes:

Other public figures, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have vocally supported government financing of energy-saving technologies, have investments in alternative energy ventures. Some scientists and policy advocates also promote energy policies that personally enrich them.

With Waxman-Markey floating around I can't imagine how she would justify that sort of conflict of interest; it is interesting that the Times is vexing their readers by noting it.  I do love their pairing of Pelosi with Robert Kennedy Jr. and the idea that Pelosi is "vocally" supporting government financing of alternative energy.  In my world, casting votes in the House as Speaker goes beyond "vocal" support. 

A Pelosi investment with T Boone Pickens attracted attention in 2008 (WSJ, Politico).

MORE:  The Times front-paged the Gore piece and tucked a wistful "if Only Obama Were President" story about disenchanted Iowa voters inside.  Why do I think of rats and sinking ships?

Comments

[Oh, yeah, I'm gonna hide my donation to save the world under a barrel.]

Last year, when he announced a $300,000,000 ad campaign to push his greedy agenda he wouldn't reveal the sources of the funding, saying they were 'internet and anonymous' donors. That made even Andy Revkin wonder a little.
=====================================

[clarice]

Doing well by doing good explains also the rich lawyers pumping "green energy" while all the media hides the fact that we are awash in gas easily recoverable in shale fields..from Pennsylvania to Louisiana and now IIRC California..Not enough for the parasites to suck off I suppose so no elite interest in that news.

[Jane]

The Pelosi part is perfect for YOU TOO

[Jane]

Hey! Where is my post. I had to go thru 2 verifications for it.

Typepad is going nuts again.

[bgates]

Wasn't John D Rockefeller the first "carbon billionaire"?

[bgates]

I am sure Dick Cheney was proud of the work done by Halliburton in supporting American interests in Iraq

Undoubtedly. He had no financial interest in them doing so, though.

[clarice]

He was started down that road at birth. His crummy old man was on Armand Hammer's payroll--you know the energy mogul in bed with the Russians.
Al didn't fall far from the tree.

[DebinNC]

The jetsetting Algore was also a hypocrite re tobacco, benefitting from its sale as long as possible, then later using his sister's death from lung cancer to boost his career. LUN

[BR]

JOMers weren't born yesterday!
Well remembered, Clarice.

[Gabriel Sutherland]

His crummy old man was on Armand Hammer's payroll--you know the energy mogul in bed with the Russians.

Didn't our President somehow matriculate to Hammer's Occidental College by sheer luck? And later transfer to Hammer's own Alma Mater in Columbia University?

Strange is it how Obama always ends up connected to energy speculators that depend on the coal business as the bedrock of their energy empire.

[Old Lurker]

LUN is a WSJ piece on the Gore roots from the Way Back Machine. Among the key words are Armand Hammer, Financial General, Zinc Mining on Gore Land.

[MayBee]

Obama's step father was in the energy biz, too.

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

Not only did Cheney not profit from Haliburton's business while Veep, upon becoming such, he donated millions of dollars of stock options to charity.

[Neo]

“All my Republican friends — and independents — are sitting back saying, ‘Oh, what did we do?”

[Or: 'Yes, we canned'.]

It's about time for the bumpersticker: 'No, you shouldn't have'.
===================================

[matt]

as they say in law, cui bono?

more crooked pols the world has never seen.

[unɹ puɐ ʇıɥ]

Neo:
“All my Republican friends — and independents — are sitting back saying, ‘Oh, what did we do?”

"Oh, my, God. What have we done."

You bought a one billion dollar president with a ten cent character.

Posted by: PeterUK February 10, 2009 at 07:45 PM

...

You are an incredibly generous man.

Posted by: bad February 10, 2009 at 07:52 PM

...

bad,I was allowing for inflation.

Posted by: PeterUK February 10, 2009 at 07:59 PM

And yes, TM has a PUK thread now up.

[sbw]

Ah, the political class!

Add to Reagan's, "Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so."

... and choose to forget so much that's inconvenient.

[Mike Huggins]

Clarice - "while all the media hides the fact that we are awash in gas easily recoverable in shale fields.

It is amazing how much we have and yet the "green" media idiots practically trip over themselves trying to get away from it. And then you have major deepwater oil finds in the Gulf, and great oil potential in areas of Alaska - Beaufort and Chukchi Sea. It's lunacy, just plain lunacy.

[narciso]

No, it's not really, there was a kernel of truth in Naomi Klein's otherwise unhinged
essay on "Palin capitalism" They don't like
the hoi polli, the not entirely socialized
in Holdren's formulation, should run riot,
only the anointed are entitled by their class, what is called nomenklatura by another name

[Jack is Back!]

Why do I think of rats and sinking ships?

Tom,

In the navy they reverse the rat guards:)

In politics they issue them free passes to the press area of Congress.

[Neo]

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

Welcome to ABC’s “V” the SciFi series

I wonder if the writers will get snarky .. will the White House declare war on ABC ?

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Okay, folks, I just made a call to my Congresscritter, jared Polis, about the health care bill. now, Jared is about as liberal as he could *possibly* be. Interesting points:

1) the call was transferred to Jared himself

2) he listened with apparent interest to my points about the excessive cost, the ill effects, and the availability of much less expensive ways of attacking the core problems

3) he allowed as how his support of the "public option" was predicated on it paying for itself. I naturally promised to send him my article on "It Ain't Insurance" and he gave me a special email address to make sure he sees it.

Note: this all happened even before I mentioned being an old fan of his Mom's poetry.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Neo, a couple of other points:

1) Morena Baccarin is way hotter than Obama. (And I love that suit she's wearing.)

2) The original script for V, long ago, was about the takeover of the US by human fascism; it got the alien aspect to make the story work better.

[narciso]

But more than Jane Badler, I'd find that hard to believe.

[Not as bad as Soros, but in league with him.]

Heh, Al Gore, in an interview with Katie Couric, again compares skeptics with people who believe the moon landing was a hoax. Maybe Al Gore knows something about the moon landings that the rest of us didn't know.

Seriously, and more chilling, he is now using the obvious 'religious' aspect of the alarmists into more traditional and mainstream religious movements and is creating climate training seminars specifically for various religions, such as Islam and Hindu.

This is a tremendously evil man.
===================

[unɹ puɐ ʇıɥ]

I am a skeptic of AGW and think Al Gore is just making it up.

I mean come on,have you ever seen Al Gore and Global Warming,anthropogenic or otherwise,together in the same city,much less the same room?

[clarice]

Religious huh? He alsmot flunked some crap course like "thinking about science", his only undergrad science course so he's an expert on climatology. And he FLUNKED out of divinity school so he surely knows about religion. (You have to be a real stoner to flunk out of divinity school, don't you?)

[clarice]

Chaco, you are truly shameless and I'm looking for a new front guy for SCAM. His mother's poetry!!

[Charlie (Colorado)]

But more than Jane Badler, I'd find that hard to believe.

What, didn't you watch Firefly?

[PD]

Rush is playing some of Rev. Wright's recent remarks trashing capitalism and praising Marxism and how the latter is better for the poor.

Doesn't he live in a home that cost something like a milliion dollars? Where does he get off mouthing off about "the privileged"?

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Chaco, you are truly shameless and I'm looking for a new front guy for SCAM. His mother's poetry!!

But, but ... I was telling the truth! His mom is a local poet. He got his great piles of money because his folks used to have a little greeting card company that they then extended onto the net; they sold it to (I think) Yahoo during the dot-com boom.

For a greeting-card newage poet, she's quite good.

Considering.

[narciso]

Point taken, Chaco,

[Rob Crawford]

The original script for V, long ago, was about the takeover of the US by human fascism; it got the alien aspect to make the story work better.

What? Human fascists promising us cures for cancer, the end to hatred, etc. etc. etc?

No wonder they went with aliens. No one would believe people would make such outlandish promises.

[clarice]

All right, Chaco--it's apparent you aren't shameless enough to be in partnership with me..

[Charlie (Colorado)]

By the way, I now predict a GOP blow out in all three of the races we've been following.

Why?

because the DNC is apparently circulating notes on why the election doesn't really matter and everything was local.

Their internal polling must be fitting with the PPP folks.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

All right, Chaco--it's apparent you aren't shameless enough to be in partnership with me..

You know, that was always a problem when I worked on Wall Street, too.

[Neo]

"Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations."

It's official now .. AGW is a religion .. at least in the UK

[unɹ puɐ ʇıɥ]

PD:
Doesn't he live in a home that cost something like a milliion dollars? Where does he get off mouthing off about "the privileged"?

$1.6M. Though that was last year,so maybe closer to $1M now.

In a neighborhood that is 2% black,93% white,compared to 15% black for all of IL.

[unɹ puɐ ʇıɥ]

The $1.6M is from more like 20 months ago,fwiw

[Rob Crawford]

In a neighborhood that is 2% black,93% white,compared to 15% black for all of IL.

Chicago is 36% black, which makes his neighborhood's racial mix stand out even more.

[clarice]

I still am puzzled about how he manages to pass as black.

[unɹ puɐ ʇıɥ]

Thanks Rob.

Oh and of course Wright's community is gated. 2.1% is not wanted, IYKWIMAITYD

[Dave (in MA)]

Charlie (Colorado), no matter the outcome tonight, the NJ race will still probably be within the margin of ACORN. Look how they "found" sufficient "votes" in MN to put Stuart Smalley in the Senate after Coleman won.

[Jane]

Hot Air is reporting a low turnout so far in heavily democrat areas in NJ - like Newark.

I think the dems will do just about anything to keep Corzine so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I dunno, Dave. There are a lot of eyes on NJ today. There are limits to how many imaginary votes they can gin up.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Okay, follow Campaign Spot. There are a lot of interesting (read "panicked") blog items showing up from Democrats, and some thought that even CA-10 might be close.

Turnout in NJ is something like 2-1 GOP. It might be very difficult to steal enough votes to push that kind of difference in voting.

[daddy]

"I think the dems will do just about anything to keep Corzine so it will be interesting to see how it plays out."

And of course lets not forget about conveniently forgetting about the ">http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzEwODc2YWY0NzRjNzZkOWU1NGMxYWRkOWZjNzI0ODE="> Absentee Military Voters.

[Jack is Back!]

A 2 to 1 GOP turnout in NJ still puts the Repubs at a disadvantage. You need more like a 4 to 1 turnout there to win. Big union state, in fact, one of the biggest. I've done business there and everyone has a hand out - especially the union guys who are bundlers for the local Dem chairman. Look up all the local Dem chairman that the FBI have put away along with the union chiefs. And yet, they still thrive, like the Taliban in a way. You just can't kill them all.

[glasater]

Top Dems: Zero won't get health care bill in 2009

[bad]

How low on the income scale will the expiration of the Bush tax cuts hit?

[TWoPolitics]

It's no wonder that Al Gore bangs the global warming drum so loudly. He's banging for bucks!

[TWoPolitics]

It's no wonder that Al Gore bangs the global warming drum so loudly. He's banging for bucks!