Posted on 04/04/2007 10:25:22 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
Al Gore is not profiting from his crusade against global warming, a spokesman for an investment firm co-founded by the former vice president said Tuesday.
Gore's London-based employee-owned company, Generation Investment Management (GIM), purchases -- but isn't a provider of -- carbon dioxide (CO2) "offsets," said spokesman Richard Campbell.
GIM is strictly an investment firm that considers how eco-friendly corporations are in assessing long-term sustainability, Campbell told Cybercast News Service by phone from London.
After Gore came under fire last week for high energy consumption in his Tennessee mansion, one explanation offered by his defenders was that he pays for carbon offsets.
The Tennessean newspaper then reported that Gore's company invests in projects to reduce energy consumption around the world, sparking accusations in other media outlets that Gore is making money off global warming by essentially paying himself for the "offsets."
(Climate campaigners have established a procedure which allows an individual, business or institution responsible for high levels of CO2 emissions to buy "offsets." They pay a levy that will go towards renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power or for planting trees - so-called "carbon sinks" that remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Thus, according to advocates, high energy users can be considered "carbon neutral," because they are making up for the amount of CO2 they produce by funding eco-friendly projects elsewhere.)
"That's a serious accusation of illegal activity," Campbell said Tuesday of the profiteering allegations.
"We do not invest in any activity of carbon offset. That's nonsense. We are a fund management business that does sustainability research," he added.
The confusion, Campbell said, arose because GIM pays to offset the energy use of its operations and the personal emissions of its 23 employees, including Gore.
So, the firm will cover the cost to offset the energy use at Gore's home, or his global jet travel, as it would the offset cost of any other employee, Campbell said.
GIM, which Gore started with former Goldman Sachs executive David Blood in 2004, uses the Chicago Climate Exchange and the British-based Carbon Neutral Company to cover the high energy use of GIM and its employees.
Just how lucrative the company is for Gore is unclear.
"Mr. Gore, as a private citizen, does not release his private income," Gore spokesman Kalee Kreider told Cybercast News Service in an e-mail response to questions about how much Gore makes from the company. Media inquiries to Gore's office must be put in writing.
The fact that Gore's Nashville home runs up electricity bills averaging $1,200 per month was publicized last week by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.
"If the issue is that severe that he fears for his children and grandchildren, he should get his own house in order as far as energy use," the think tank's president, Drew Johnson, told Cybercast News Service.
"I question someone more when he has so much to gain politically and financially by using scare tactics," he said.
'Shaming others into living differently'
Critics question the validity of offsetting emissions, in part because the system doesn't require those wealthy enough to afford offsets to conserve anything.
"I question if offsets are real or a way to get a certificate you can frame that says 'I'm a virtuous person,'" Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), told Cybercast News Service.
"This really is a class thing. Other than the rich, no one else can buy offsets."
Ebell said this means people like Gore "can continue to live exactly the way they want and shame others into living differently."
The conservative CEI has been a leading skeptic of the notion that human activity is causing global warming. But Ebell said that if Gore believes in it, he should act more like a leader.
"A leader leads by example," Ebell said. "A general doesn't pay someone else to lead the charge."
It can be difficult to know to what extent such offsets really work, said Ben Dunham, staff attorney for the liberal U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
"These personal offset companies really do invest in projects somewhere in the world," Dunham told Cybercast News Service. "The problem is you can never be sure a project wouldn't happen anyway regardless of the contribution."
Ted Dodge, executive director of the National Carbon Offsets Coalition, said advocates of this offset industry agree about the need to impose more regulations.
Currently, industry standards are set by the Chicago Climate Exchange - the only carbon offset firm in North America, Dodge said.
"This is not the answer to global climate change, but it's part of the answer," Dodge said.
"These are real offsets. This is a bridge to the future. It's not a real option to shut out fossil fuels now," he added.
Ex-campaign manager
The president of GIM's U.S. operation is Peter S. Knight, who served as Gore's chief of staff in the U.S. Senate and later as campaign manager for the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996.
Knight is a controversial figure. In 1999, Republicans on the House Commerce Committee asked then U.S. Attorney Janet Reno to investigate whether a $1 million payment to Knight from a Tennessee developer was an illegal contingency fee for helping get the Federal Communications Commission to move to the development.
Knight and the developer, Franklin Haney, said the payment was for legal fees for Knight's work on several projects. Reno declined to investigate.
Knight is traveling this week and isn't available for an interview, according to the Washington office of Generation Investment Management.
Instead, Al Gore's company buys carbon offsets from a company called CarbonNeutral for all of Al Gore's private and public carbon-producing sins. I wonder whether GIM can write these purchases off for tax purposes and/or Al Gore is required to pay taxes on this fringe benefit. If GIM is writing it off and Al Gore isn't paying any additional taxes, then congratulations! You and I are effectively partners in Al Gore's carbon indulgence purchase!
Ping!
Riiiiiiiiight!
OK, so the company doesn’t “purchase” or “sell” carbon offsets. (So the spokesman claims.)
But then why did Gore HIMSELF that he bought bought carbon offsets FROM this company?
And (by the way) what good does purchasing carbon offsets of 10% of your use do, when you’re USING 10 TIMES the amount of energy a normal family uses? In ONE if three houses nationally?
Forget the aircraft and planes and taxis and hotels ....
So Albore is buying carbon credits, but isn’t buying them.
And Clinton never told a lie either....
Here’s some more about Al Gore’s carbon offsets and his partner:
Maurice Strong, Al Gore
Creators of carbon credit scheme cashing in on it
http://adognamedkyoto.blogspot.com/
By Judi McLeod
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
There’s an elephant in global warming’s living room that few in the mainstream media want to talk about: the creators of the carbon credit scheme are the ones cashing in on it.
The two cherub like choirboys singing loudest in the Holier Than Thou Global Warming Cathedral are Maurice Strong and Al Gore.
This duo has done more than anyone else to advance the alarmism of man-made global warming.
With little media monitoring, both Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C.” of which he is both chairman and founding partner.
To hear the saving-the-earth singsong of this dynamic duo, even the feather light petals of cherry blossoms in Washington leave a bigger carbon footprint.
It’s a strange global warming partnership that Strong and Gore have, but it’s one that’s working.
Strong is the silent partner, a man whose name often draws a blank in the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of a beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the Unites States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he works to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is big cheese in the world of climate change, and is one of the main architects of the coming-your-way-soon Kyoto Protocol.
Gore is the glitzy, media approved front man in the partnership, the flashing neon lights on the global stage warning the masses of the end of Earth, as we know it, and Hollywood’s poster boy for greening the silver screen.
The skeptics of man-made global warming believe that Gore and Strong have made climate change “the new religion”. Climate change is not the first religion both parties have tried to make stick. Along with former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Strong, currently president of the Earth Council, has been boasting of replacing the Ten Commandments with the Earth Charter, a golden rule guide for how the masses should treat the environment.
Gore, who has given sermons at the United Nations sponsored Cathedral of St. John the Divine Church in New York City, is a promoter of the religion known as Gaia.
The two environmental gurus also share a belief in radical Malthusian population reduction. According to them, too many people, particularly in the U.S. are polluting the planet, emitting excessive Freon through their refrigerators and jacking up the air conditioning.
But the conduct of Al Gore and Maurice Strong in the capitalist world is one for the books. It’s a side of them that may have remained unknown had it not been for the investigative talent of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of An Inconvenient Truth traveled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day. First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide,” wrote EIR.
“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.
“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When, in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice Strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.
“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice Strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.
In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, the Korean man found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.
In that year, Gore, still U.S. vice president, was making news for “taking the initiative in creating the Internet.”
The leaders of the man-made global warming movement, you might say, get around.
Meanwhile Jumbo’s still in global warming’s living room, but the duo with the tiniest carbon footprints on earth continue to just tiptoe past him.
Canada Free Press founding editor Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck and The Rant. Judi can be reached at: letters@canadafreepress.com.
Yeah right, I’m going to buy “offsets”. These people sound like Amway.
I suspect there is iced tea involvement here.
Anybody know what a carbon offset actually costs in dollars per whatever unit of CO2 produced?
This is strange. If you are an investment firm you sell something of value to a person in the form of stock. If you have sold them this stock the investor (AKA Al Gore) then has a stock or something of worth that he can then sell for money. If this is correct Al Gore did not buy carbon credits but invested in a company that will probably pay him a handsome return. Al Gore may be a raving left wing moon bat, but when it comes to his own personal money he is a Steve Forbes Capitalist.
Amway (formerly named) sold products, not global warming philosophy.
A 'carbon offset' is not a product at least not now, wake up.
Sweet tea!
Amway sold a pyramid recruiting scheme. The products were means, not an end.
These offsets appear to be not much more than indulgences, a promise of forgiveness and the implication of some offsetting good work.
I, for the life of me, do not understand how this works. Somebody, somewhere is making a boatload of free money off of this and I want to know who.
And shake their hand, this is a great scam.
Grant me some...
That is just quackery. Neither solar nor wind power remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can, but they take many years to do it. And once they die, they release the carbon right back to the environment.
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