Al Gore to Promote Green Business

Nobel Peace Prize winner and former US Vice President Al Gore is becoming a partner in a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm that funds and promotes new ways to curb global warming.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and former US Vice President Al Gore is not one to sit on his laurels.

After his path-breaking documentaries that aroused the world’s conscience on the challenges posed by global warming, he is now slated to promote green business.

He has announced that he is Gore is becoming a partner in a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm that funds and promotes new ways to curb global warming.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Generation Investment Management is a global collaboration to find, fund and accelerate green business, technology and policy solutions, including renewable energy technology, carbon markets and sustainable agriculture.

Gore says that it will take both government action and private investment to make real progress on global warming.

'We've now reached the stage where this shift is going to happen with or without new government policies. ... The business sector is ahead of the policy maker community in recognizing this shift toward a low-carbon economy has to take place,' Gore says, although he does note that he believes new government policies will be forthcoming.

He downplays the impact of winning the Nobel Prize on his work and explains the connection between climate change and global conflict.

Gore says the rapid retreat of the polar ice cap and the gearing up of navies and 'nationalistic impulses' to exploit this new, ice-free ocean is one example of how the climate crisis — with its 'disruptive consequences' — has the potential for causing conflict.

'But it also has the potential for creating new areas of collaboration and cooperation, and my own work is aimed at trying to create those new opportunities,' Gore says.

The former vice president also doesn't rule out playing some role in the political process in the future, but says it's not likely.

'What politics has become is less attractive to me than in the past, but it still is the form in which the most important decisions are made, and I recognize and respect that.'

Gore says he will donate his salary as a partner in the venture capital firm to the Alliance for Climate Protection, the advocacy group he founded. That would not include his stock options.

Source-Medindia
LIN/P