Al Gore Walks Away From Green Energy
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When Al Gore talks, people listen. Just ask the folks who hand out Academy Awards and Nobel Peace Prizes.
Al Gore also talks to investors. Since 2007, the former Vice President in Bill Clinton's administration has been preaching the benefits of putting your money where his mouth is: Alternative energy.
But if Al Gore has any message for investors today, it might very well be this: "Stay the hell away from alternative energy!"
Not that he would say so. At least out loud.
Reading through the promotional materials he puts out through his company, Generation Investment, it is hard to tell whether his "Client Update" is selling investments in his Climate Solutions Fund or memberships in the Sierra Club.
"Scientific fundamentals continue to point to a need for urgent action on climate," Gore says. Just like his Oscar-winning movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," it has lots of cool charts and graphics.
Climate policy is still firmly on the political agenda and corporate climate-related activity is increasingly strategic. Innovation is driving costs down and improving the business case for low carbon and high efficiency solutions.
This goes on for 20 pages. But even Gore does not seem to be listening anymore.
Gore's company files a quarterly report with the SEC that tells a different story about the 30 stocks in its portfolio. His company's public investments in wind, solar, biomass and other alternative energy to combat climate change are practically non-existent.
But his portfolio is top-heavy in high-tech, medical instruments, and even more pedestrian investments in companies such as Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Colgate Palmolive (CL), Nielsen (NLSN), Strayer University (STRA), and Qualcomm (QCOM).
He is also big in China, with stakes in a big Chinese travel agency, CTrip, and China's largest medical equipment manufacturer, Mindray Medical.
And if you want a piece of the natural gas pipeline game -- heavily dependent on the environmentally suspect fracking -- you can find that in Gore's portfolio as well with Quanta Services (PWR).
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spokeninvested, AGW is dead. Live short and pay excessive taxes.I have personally heard young girls discussing babies as a form of income, as each one means another paycheck. Then those same well adjusted children go to school without having learned any discipline, and eat up school funds and teacher resources, all while the parents pay nothing toward said school system. Instead the parents sit at home and further bleed our treasury, while the paychecks go and make more little paychecks, and debase our moral structure and family units.
You don't find solar panels or hybrids in the hood. We need to educate our poor and as Franklin said, "Make them uncomfortable in their poverty", or they will dwell in it for generations to come, their population growing leaps and bounds while the tax base shrinks.
It's time to stop fiddling.
1. Hilary Clinton
2. Al Gore
3. Prince Charles
4. The Obamas
5. Richard Branson
6. Bono
7. Michael Mann
8. Ben Bernanke
9. Paul Krugman
... I could be here all day building this list...
They got a free pass that time, but this time too many people know what they are trying to do to let them ever forget.