Al Gore, the world's first carbon billionaire?

Al Gore's latest eco-treatise,Our Choice: A Plan To Solve the Climate Crisis, is set to hit stores Tuesday. The former vice-president says he will donate 100 percent of the proceeds from the book to the the Alliance for Climate Protection, a green group.

But it turns out that the book money is small potatoes compared to what Gore could earn from his various eco-friendly investments. As a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital heavyweight Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Gore is poised to reap hundreds of millions from investments in the companies that will benefit from the government's increased emphasis on green technology. According to The New York Times's John Broder, Gore could become the world's first "carbon billionaire."

To be sure, Gore has enemies, and many of them. He picked them up throughout a long career in public service, first as congressman, then as a senator -- he was dubbed Sen. Moonbeam -- then as vice-president to Bill Clinton, and finally as a green tech evangelist and ecological doomsayer.

Now these foes are fuming that Gore is poised to profit -- in a big way -- from investments in companies which seek to address the ecological crises he has been warnings about for years. Broder writes that Gore could be viewed as "profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in."

Today, Gore does not reveal his net worth, but the fact that he was able to single-handedly make a $35 million investment in Capricorn Investment Group, a private equity fund started by his friend Jeff Skoll, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and film producer, speaks volumes about the magnitude of his wealth.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/11/03/al-gore-the-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire/