Posted on 05/13/2013 3:40:15 PM PDT by neverdem
A leading venture capital firm gets taken to the clean energy cleaners.
The story in the New York Times says Kleiner Perkins has been humbled by the past decades performance. That seems appropriate. The nations most famous venture capital firm had a stunning 35.7 percent annual rate of return in the decade of the 1990s. That was before they met Al Gore.
Somewhere around the time Gore had won his Academy Award for warning the world about global warming, the former Vice President was hired on as a senior partner at KPCB. Fortune wrote an article describing Gore sitting in the board room firing off ideas after calling Senator Barbara Boxer on the way over to get government on board. Clean Energy! It was the Next Big Thing! Silicon Valley would do for the nations energy generation what it had done for computers discover technological secrets that would change the whole game. And make money at it, too! After all, solar cells were made out of the same thing as computer chips, right? Silicon! If Silicon Valley could do for solar what it had done for the microchip well, think of it!
Gore seems to have made out all right in all this. A report that came out about...
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(To his credit, Bill Gates has made the same survey of Americas energy landscape and concluded nuclear is the way to go. His Intellectual Ventures decided to sponsor development of the Traveling Wave reactor, a futuristic design that produces no waste and does not have to be refueled for 50 years. Discovering that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was backed up ten years considering new designs, he took the project to China. He is currently working with the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation.)...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
I don’t have a link to this but I recall a story from the time after Gore left politics and was casting about looking for something else to do.
He had an interview with some company. They asked him, Mr. Gore, what can you do for us?
He was stunned. Didn’t have an answer. Nobody had ever asked him that before.
When you act stupid, you are gonna get stupid.
I can personally vouch for the fact that these Bay Area VCs think they are the smartest people who ever came down the pike, most of them anyway.
The fact that they trusted a fool like Al Gore just shows how dumb you can get when you let ideology into the value equation.
The leftists push of the AGW scam was the biggest fraud on the american people until THE FOREIGNER came onto the scene. When you have a business model based on fraud it only has one place to go.
listen... warming, cooling, it was 50/50. so i took a shot!!!
“the things he has to offer are access and influence’
The ‘aristcracy of pull’ as a somewhat well known author once wrote.
Your story reminds me of when Ted Kennedy was asked in an interview why he wanted to be president. He didn’t have an answer, either.
Al Gore never won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth. Davis Guggenheim won that Oscar. Gore went on stage to hold the Oscar for a photo op—another case when perception is more important than reality.
If they are seeking connections to Russian billionaires (hint, hint, nudge, nudge, say no more).
Goes back to Daddy Gore, Sr., being the buddy of the Russian-American billionaire Armand Hammer.
Junior has also always had a close relationship with daddy buddy Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum, which bought into the Elk Hills strategic petroleum reserve in 1998 for $3.65 billion.
Incidentally, a similar purchase is what inspired the Teapot Dome scandal during the Harding administration; scandal standards have changed over the years.
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