thebigp

Amy Harder--AXIOS

Not all carbon footprints are created equally.
Driving the news: Famous, rich and activist people face acute scrutiny given their ability to influence the masses. With that in mind, I explored the travel and consumption habits of four notable people supporting action on c*****e c****e: Greta Thunberg, Bill Gates, Bill McKibben and Al Gore.
Why it matters: Individual behavior tackling c*****e c****e is getting greater attention as inaction on the matter persists among governments. A recent peer-reviewed study found that people are more likely to listen to others calling for action on c*****e c****e if they personally have lower carbon footprints.
Al Gore
The former vice president has faced by far the most accusations of hypocrisy for being a climate activist while living a rich and carbon-intensive lifestyle, according to a peer-reviewed 2018 study on the topic.
“He recognizes how important these everyday choices are, while spending most of his time working to catalyze a global effort to change laws and policies,” a spokesperson for Gore said.
• The former vice president doesn’t own a private jet and offsets travel for himself and staff through a program that cancels out your carbon footprint by ostensibly preventing emissions elsewhere (like planting trees or supporting renewable energy).
• A vegan for six years, Gore is now touting the experiments his Tennessee farm is conducting to try to make agriculture and livestock more climate-friendly.
Blood And Gore: Making A K*****g On Anti-Carbon Investment Hype
Larry Bell--FORBES
Contributor
I write about aerospace, environment, energy, Second Amendment policy
Nov 3, 2013,10:00am EST
Surprise! Al Gore and his carbon credit huckstering partner David Blood, both principals at Generation Investment Management (GIM), warn in their October 30 Wall Street Journal op/ed feature of peril to f****l f**l investments due to “The Coming Carbon Asset Bubble”. They argue that such “unwise and increasingly wreck less” investment strategies pose three broad risks which will cause carbon assets to become “stranded” and lose economic value: through direct government carbon regulation; as a result of market-share losses to “already competitive” renewable technologies; and due to “sociopolitical pressures” causing carbon-intensive businesses to lose their “license to operate”.
Marketing Climate Alarm:
Of course this carbon regulation is posited upon saving the Earth based upon a “consensus within the scientific community that increasing the global temperature by more than 2oC will likely cause devastating and irreversible damage to the planet.” And where it comes to promulgating and capitalizing upon carbon-climate-crazed sociopolitical pressure, you would be hard-pressed to find two better authorities.
Gore and Blood, the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM), co-founded London-based GIM in 2004. Between 2008 and 2011 the company had raised profits of nearly $218 million from institutions and wealthy investors. By 2008 Gore was able to put $35 million into hedge funds and private partnerships through the Capricorn Investment Group, a Palo Alto company founded by his Canadian billionaire buddy Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of EBay Inc. It was Skoll’s Participant Media that produced Gore’s feverishly frightening 2006 horror film, “An Inconvenient T***h”.
In 2007, following an investigation of the movie, Sir Michael Burton, a judge in London’s High Court, ruled that it can be shown in secondary schools only if accompanied by guidance notes for teachers to balance Mr. Gore’s “one-sided” views. Judge Barton pointed out that its “apocalyptical vision” was politically partisan, and not an impartial analysis. He stated: “It is built around the charismatic presence of the ex-vice president Al Gore, whose crusade is to persuade the world of the dangers of c*****e c****e caused by g****l w*****g…It is now common ground that this is not simply a science film- although it is based substantially on science research and opinion, but it is [clearly] a political film.”
The Browning of those Green Investments:
As for taking their recent investment advice, it might be worth mentioning that some of GIM’s earlier low-carbon deals haven’t always worked out so great.
Optimistic that a Democrat-controlled Congress would pass cap-and-trade legislation Gore lobbied for, GIM and David Blood’s old GSAM firm took big stakes in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) for carbon trading. Accordingly, CCX was poised to make windfall profits selling CO2 offsets if and when cap-and-trade was passed. Speaking before a 2007 Joint House Hearing of the Energy Science Committee, Gore told members: “As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave [of investment] in it…There will be unchained investment.”
After all, what better way to reduce evil carbon than to make it a profitable commodity? But unfortunately for GIM and CCX investors, trading hot air credits proved just too good to be true.
Between May of 2008 and October of 2009 the CCX market value for one metric ton of carbon plummeted from $7 per metric ton to $0.10 along with the shareholders’ investment values. Losers included the Ford Motor Company, Amtrak, DuPont, Dow Corning, American Electric Power, International Paper, and Waste Management, along with the states of Illinois and New Mexico, seven cities, and a number of universities.
By 2010, GIM approximately doubled a 9.6% stake it had purchased in Camco International Ltd., a manager of products to limit greenhouse gases. But by October of that year disaster struck again. Republicans took control of the House, dashing all cap-and-capitalize hopes along with huge profit prospects for either Camco or CCX. The latter shut down operations in November of that year.
On top of that bad news, First Solar Inc., another GIM investment, got squeezed out of the solar panel market by cheaper Chinese products. According to Bloomberg, GIM dumped its last First Solar stock at a $165.9 million loss in 2012.