Cap-and-Trade Politico Hauls Green to the Bank

Investors Business Daily recently published an interesting tidbit:

When Gore left office in January 2001, he was said to have a net worth in the neighborhood of $2 million. A mere eight years later, estimates are that he is now worth about $100 million. It seems it's easy being green, at least for some.

I remember Al Gore. He's that guy who profited so handsomely from the privatization of the U.S. Navy's oil reserve, a fact that somehow doesn't surface in his lectures, books, green junk-science "documentary," Oscar or Nobel Prize acceptance speeches, or in news reports about the man. Nevertheless:

In September of 1995, as part of the pompously named National Performance Review–Al Gore’s fatuous project to cut down government waste, fraud and mismanagement–the Vice President boldly declared that he was recommending the privatization of Elk Hills, a 47,000-acre oil-rich land in Southern California. Since 1912 it had been in the possession of the U.S. Navy as an emergency oil reserve. The oil companies salivated and made their bids. In October 1997 the Energy Dept. announced that the U.S. government would sell its stake in Elk Hills to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion. Overnight, Occidental’s U.S. oil reserves tripled. Occidental’s stock surged and its stockholders glowed. One of them was the Vice President’s father, Al Gore Sr. He owned more than $500,000 worth of Occidental stock.

Funny, the last time the American people were divested of this land, to Pan American Petroleum in 1922, it led to the Teapot Dome scandal; a Congressional investigation and a U.S. Supreme Court decision restored it back to the American people, so that it could eventually be used as a reserve during 1973-1974 Arab Oil Embargo, in which Arab petroleum exporters decided to stop shipping oil to the U.S. so Israel couldn't get their hands on any during the Yom Kippur war.

As Investor's Business Daily pointed out, during hearings last Friday on cap-and- trade legislation before the House Energy and Commerce Committee at which Gore was a "star witness," Rep. Marsha Blackburn [R-Tenn], got "curious about how a man dedicated to saving the planet could get so wealthy so quickly."

Gore is a member of a venture capital group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which, Blackburn noted, has so far invested "about a billion dollars" "in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation that we are discussing here today."

Blackburn then asked the $100 million question: "Is that something that you are going to personally benefit from?" Gore gave the stock answer that "the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it but every penny that I have made I have put right into a nonprofit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to spread awareness of why we have to take on this challenge."

In his enthusiasm to "spread awareness," Gore has managed to amass stakes in a number of other green investments and to co-found "Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets that allow rich polluters to continue with a clear conscience."

"It's a scheme," predicts Investor's Business Daily, "that will make traders of this new commodity rich and Bernie Madoff look like a pickpocket."