"Sure sound like they plan to make a lot of money off global warming" ...
Al Gore's nonprofit Alliance for Climate Protection plans to spend $300 million on an advertising campaign aimed at convincing the American public that they urgently need to embrace (economy-crippling) controls on carbon emissions and press politicians to act. Gore happens to be chairman and founder of GIM, a firm that invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are becoming environmentally-friendly, to use green parlance.
In this post, GIM spokesman Richard Campbell responses saying that the statements were a "nonsense story" on chairman Gore, who now has a net worth greater than $100 million.
As Fast Company notes (Gore): has made an enormous amount of money and achieved positions of influence from technology to financial services to media. He and Tipper are even setting themselves up as angel investors for "a new type of capitalism in which there is more than one bottom line to consider, more than one master to serve."
Gore's partner at GIM, David Blood, article also states that (Blood): sees climate change creating an entirely new business stratum, he said, similar to that surrounding the so-called Internet economy...
Gore is also America's most prominent advocate for legislated carbon emissions controls in the form of the so-called cap-and-trade system. In a cap-and-trade system, the government creates by fiat an artificial scarcity in the right to generate carbon emissions. The idea is that there would be a fixed quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2) production allowed and that businesses or industries that wanted to exceed their allowance (in order to do the things that make them money) would have to buy the unused portions of others' allowances. These carbon credits are then traded on an exchange, as is currently done in Europe.
When a financial instrument is traded in a market, people make money off it, whether directly or indirectly – investors, sellers, brokers, dealers, financial advisors – even investment executives like Al Gore. As for carbon offsets, the U.S. market for such products and its attendant "feel-good hype" could be "as high as $100 million…up from next to nothing just a couple of years ago," reports Business Week.
If CO2 limits become the law of the land --as John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have all promised on the campaign trail-- the market for carbon emission offsets and "Blood and Gore" profits would probably grow exponentially.