Gore mixing business with role as 'green' leader

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 Gore is a partner.

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

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.

Federal grant

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 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.

And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as 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 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.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., asserted at a hearing this year that Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

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?" Gore said. "I am proud of it. I am proud of it."

In an e-mail message this week, he said his investment activities were consistent with his public advocacy over decades.

"I have advocated policies to promote renewable energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution for decades, including all of the time I was in public service," Gore wrote.

"As a private citizen, I have continued to advocate the same policies. Even though the vast majority of my business career has been in areas that do not involve renewable energy or global warming pollution reductions, I absolutely believe in investing in ways that are consistent with my values and beliefs. I encourage others to invest in the same way."

Waterless urinals

Gore has invested a big part of the tens of millions of dollars he has earned since leaving government in 2001 in a broad array of environmentally friendly business ventures, like carbon-trading markets, solar cells and waterless urinals.

He has also given away millions more to finance the nonprofit he founded, the Alliance for Climate Protection, and to another group, the Climate Project, which trains people to present the slide show that was the basis of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Royalties from his new book on climate change, "Our Choice," printed on 100 percent recycled paper, will go to the alliance, an aide said.

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

As a private citizen, Gore does not have to disclose his income or assets. When he left government in early 2001, he listed assets of less than $2 million, including homes in suburban Washington and in Tennessee.

Since then, his net worth has skyrocketed, helped by timely investments in Apple and Google, profits from books and his movie, and scores of speeches for which is he can be paid more than $100,000, although he often speaks at no charge.

He is a founder of Generation Investment Management, based in London and run by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (the firm was quickly dubbed Blood and Gore).

Gore earns a partner's salary at Kleiner Perkins. And he has substantial personal finances invested at both firms, officials of the companies said.

He also serves as an adviser to high-profile technology companies including Apple and Google, relationships that have paid him handsome dividends over the last eight years.

Gore's spokeswoman would not give a figure for his current net worth, but the scale of his wealth is evident in a single investment of $35 million in Capricorn Investment Group, a private equity fund started by his friend Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay.

Ion Yadigaroglu, a co-founder of Capricorn, said Gore does not sit on the fund's investment committee, but obviously agrees with the partners' strategy of putting long-term money into promising ventures in energy, technology and health care around the globe.

"Aspirationally," said Yadigaroglu, who holds a doctorate from Stanford in astrophysics, "we're trying to make more money than others doing the same thing and do it in a way that is superior in ethics and impacts."

Gore has said he invested in partnerships and funds that try to identify and support companies advancing cutting-edge green technologies and are paving the way toward a low-carbon economy.

He has a stake in the world's pre-eminent carbon-credit trading market and in companies in biofuels, sustainable fish farming, electric vehicles and solar power.

Capricorn holds a major stake in Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the world's leading maker of waterless urinals.

Generation has holdings in Ausra, a solar-energy company in California, and Camco, a British firm that develops carbon-dioxide-emissions reduction projects.

Kleiner Perkins has a green-ventures fund with nearly $1 billion invested in renewable energy and efficiency concerns.