Originally Published in The Wall Street Journal, Review & Outlook, November 20, 2007
Editors Note by Cornwall Founder Dr. E. Calvin Beisner.
Click here to read the article at WSJ.com .
Al Gore no longer needs to make claims about creating the Internet, because the former Vice President deserves much of the credit for creating an entire new industry — the global warming business.
And like the energy barons of an earlier age, Mr. Gore has the chance to achieve enormous wealth after being named last week as a new partner at the famously successful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. No fewer than three of his new colleagues sit on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. If Mr. Gore can develop market-based solutions to environmental challenges, we will cheer the well-deserved riches flowing his way. On the other hand, if he monetizes his Nobel Peace Prize by securing permanent government subsidies for nonmarket science projects, he’ll have earned a different judgment.
There’s no shortage of new capital pouring into alternative energy projects these days. According to the National Venture Capital Association, “clean tech” start-ups attracted more than $800 million in venture capital last quarter, a new record. What’s not clear is whether these are fundamentally energy ventures or political ventures. The Manhattan Institute’s Peter Huber, a former engineering professor at MIT, exaggerates only slightly when he says that “Basically, ‘alternative’ means stuff that nobody actually uses.” If that turns out to be true, then alternative energy companies could struggle for market share without government assistance.
Those doubts exist even for the companies backed by Kleiner Perkins. After making more than a dozen “green tech” investments, Kleiner is still waiting for its first exit. According to a Kleiner spokeswoman, many companies in its portfolio are “in stealth mode.” The firm will “neither name nor comment on them.” So it’s impossible to determine precisely how much the Kleiner-backed firms will benefit from either current federal subsidies, or new provisions that are part of the House and Senate versions of the stalled energy bill. But we do have some hints.
Of the portfolio companies acknowledged publicly by Kleiner, at least two, Altra and Mascoma, are involved in the production of ethanol, which is already heavily subsidized and would get more subsidies in the House bill and higher mandates in the Senate version. A third firm in the portfolio, Amyris Biotechnologies, is developing a biofuel that will provide “more energy than ethanol,” according to its Web site, and should be just as eligible for government set-asides.
Two portfolio companies in the solar energy field, Miasole and Ausra, should benefit if a House provision requiring investor-owned utilities to generate 15% of their power from wind, solar or geothermal sources becomes law. The same is true for Altarock Energy, a Kleiner-backed geothermal company. Lux Research analyst Ying Wu reports that “company valuations will take a pretty big hit” in Miasole’s market segment if Washington turns off the subsidy spigot.
To put it another way, Kleiner’s “risk-taking” here isn’t all economic. When everything is going according to plan, do venture capitalists normally turn to a politician/filmmaker to help them cash out of engineering firms?
Nope, but then again alternative energy has never fit the usual venture model. Jack Biddle, co-founder of Novak Biddle Venture Partners, says there’s a reason few start-up companies try to build commercial jetliners. “Large, complex systems with slow deployment cycles do not play to venture’s strengths. The whole idea with venture-backed companies is speed, speed, speed.” Mr. Biddle says the size and complexity of energy systems “make 787s look like tinker toys. You need lots of capital, lots of time, lots of people.”
Mr. Gore seems to grasp the scale of the challenge, and the need for government help, telling Fortune magazine, “What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Project and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally.” That’s the kind of “green” vision that will require a lot of greenbacks.
We’ll be as happy as the Sierra Club if one or more of these new technologies turns out to solve the secrets of cheap, efficient energy. But we recall the same technological promises being made in the 1970s, the last time the feds poured subsidies into alternative fuels.
Which leads us to suspect that maybe Mr. Gore has been hired by Kleiner Perkins for more than his technological knowhow, investment acumen, or global vision. His new partners may have hired him for the more prosaic task of getting 60 Senate votes to keep those taxpayer greenbacks coming.
Editor’s note:
In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, Gore called for a “global Marshall Plan.” “. . . I propose a program involving as many countries as possible that will use schoolteachers and their students to monitor the entire earth daily. . . .”
That proposal was one tiny part of his sweeping “Global Marshall Plan” to stave off environmental disasters. It seemed insignificant compared with others. But it revealed both Gore’s political instincts and his inability to see consequences of his ideas.
Never mind the absurdity of further burdening schools that fail to teach children basic skills. More ominous is Gore’s failure to realize that he has proposed that all students and teachers be involuntarily conscripted. It’s what people used to call slavery.
Sadly, most of the rest of Gore’s proposals (like his voting record in Congress) are consistent with these statist political instincts. The “Global Marshall Plan” consisted of five “strategic goals” (summarized on pp. 305-7) and the means of achieving them:
- stabilizing world population (“No goal is more crucial . . .”) by raising literacy rates, lowering infant mortality, and increasing access to birth control techniques (i.e., promoting abortion on demand);
- “rapid creation and development of environmentally appropriate technologies” by subsidizing R&D and the transfer of technologies to developing countries (Who pays for the development and transfers? If the “appropriate technologies” are marketable, there’s no need for a Marshall Plan to develop them. If they’re not, government subsidies for them are a waste.);
- comprehensive changes in economic measurements (e.g., to reflect environmental damage and resource depletion as negatives in GNP—a sensible idea in principle but frequently applied senselessly, and not balanced by the insistence that positive side effects [like the fertilizing impact of heightened CO2] be accounted for just as much as negative ones);
- “negotiation and approval of a new generation of international agreements that will embody regulatory frameworks, specific prohibitions, enforcement mechanisms, cooperative planning, sharing arrangements, incentives, penalties, and mutual obligations necessary to make the overall plan a success” (The implications for increased taxes, bureaucracies, regulations, and threats to national sovereignty are mind boggling.);
- “establishment of a cooperative plan for educating the world’s citizens about our global environment” (Shades of 1984 arose in my mind when I read that fifteen years ago. What would happen to dissenting voices when global intergovernmental agreements promoted a single view of the alleged crises? We no longer have to wonder. We’ve seen the results: scientists who dissent from the politician leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are compared with Holocaust deniers who ought to be defendants in Nuremberg trials accused of selling their opinions to industry.).
Gore stared inconsistencies straight in the eye and ignored them. On p. 301, he wrote that the “framework of global agreements” must “obligate all nations to act in concert . . . while carefully respecting the integrity of individual nation-states.” But on p. 302 he wrote that the agreements “will contain both incentives and legally valid penalties for noncompliance.” So much for national sovereignty.
To put it simply: Gore, like former French President Jacques Chirac, who in 2001 called Kyoto the first component of “authentic global governance” (http://cei.org/op-eds-and-articles/chirac-kyoto-first-step-toward-global-governance) is in pursuit of one-world, transnational government.
Al Gore has positioned himself to become enormously rich through government-subsidized programs to achieve his environmental goals while promoting one-world government. No doubt that’s what qualified him for the Nobel Peace Prize.—E. Calvin Beisner
Click here to read the article at WSJ.com.
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