But you're not, like, bitter or anything. ;)

I see you mentioned peak oil ...

Well have a few more peaks. Peak hypocracy from just about everywhere. The Dems , The Repugs , The White House , The Fed , The Corporations and now Al Gore.

Anything scalable will need vast sums of money to implement. Anything scalable will need a fast track through red tape.All Al Gore is offering is to get a nice licence fee for himself and his partners after the government goes ahead with any break through.

Maybe Al could say something about how the Dems droppped tax breaks for clean energy in the new energy bill.

... maybe he should have dared something drastic, like, I dunno, running for president again.

I'm glad that Gore isn't running. His party desperately needs new life, and a self-imposed "one strike and you're out" rule goes a long way to nurturing promising young sprouts like Barack Obama. I similarly admire Kerry for the same reason (if few others), and the Green Party for rejecting Nader after his first run.

That's not to say that Gore shouldn't have been President in the first place — at one time I looked eagerly forward to protesting the vast legal-environmental complex of the Gore Administration and its draconian global warming laws, rammed through with the consent of a frightened populace as a poor substitute for a more visionary, empowering energy paradigm.

I guess we got that anyway, except without controlling global warming.

Al Gore has done a pretty good job so far from outside the US government.

www.HelpWorldClimate.com

sorry kids.

Now you've done it, Andrew. You've actually suggested that Al Gore might not be the Second Coming and that, like most other mortals, he might be motivated by things other than altruism.

Maybe Kleiner-Perkins will genuinely help environmental causes; maybe it won't. One thing it has to do, however, as a business, is to make money. One of the great fallacies of our era is that we can have risk-free and pain-free social change if we leave it all up to "the market". Yes, the market will find magical solutions that will allow us to continue our patterns of consumption and energy usage if only we believe!

Environmental issues tend to make hypocrites of us all - no less Gore, who personally uses more energy than several hundred if not thousand people in the developing world. By all means, let's invest in green-friendly technologies. Curious, though, isn't it, how common-sense ideas like conservation, reducing consumption (yes, that means buying less stuff), and the big bugaboo - population control - languish?

People just don't want to believe it. By all the visible calculus, Gore either runs for president or discredits himself and his cause.

I'm sure the trolls will jump all over this post. Al Gore scares the s**t out of them because 1) he's been right all along, and 2) they've already slung all the mud at him they can.

PS - Can't wait for all the fresh-air and new ideas Hilary is going to bring to the party!

VC is nothing more than institutionalized pillaging. Look for K-P to lead a charge that will have other VC firms following in lemming-like fashion to quickly over-fund 10 or so green companies while the remaining thousands of ideas languish and die. After a "shake-up" or two in the new "greentech" industry, one VC group will own all of the intellectual property, which it will then sell to the highest bidder for burial.

I wonder what kind of carbon footprint his personal fortune has? I bet it's bigger than yours and mine.

Sorry, but no poverty = no charity balls, and no prizes, and no funny little statues either.

Curious, though, isn't it, how common-sense ideas like conservation, reducing consumption (yes, that means buying less stuff), and the big bugaboo - population control - languish?

I would hardly say that conservation and reducing consumption are languishing ideas. Population control relatively languishes because the U.S. under Bush is fundamentally against promoting birth control and women's rights in under-developed countries (and, indeed, in the U.S. itself), which is the only meaningful avenue of world population control.

I wonder what kind of carbon footprint his personal fortune has?

Zero. He's rich enough to purchase green power where its available and carbon offsets for the rest, and does.

His critics like to point out how much he spends on energy, but of course he spends so much precisely because he insists on doing so as greenly as possible.

This was fabulous, Mr. Leonard...

But at another point in the same article, Gore says "We all believe that markets must play a central role."

O.K. What do the Manhattan Project, Apollo project and the Marshall Plan all have in common?

The "market" was not the prime mover in their success.

I've groused elsewhere that the US needs a Manhattan Project for alternative energy (specifically wind and solar, versus fake alternative like ethanol, nuclear, biodiesel, and hydrogen fuel cells), and that if we'd invested the money being pissed away in Iraq on that kind of a project, we'd likely have those alternatives up and running. But somehow that kind of a project is extreme, while waging a futile war for a waning resource in a volatile region is somehow pragmatic and sensible.

That Gore would opt for the "doing well by doing good" approach to market-driven reform is entirely in character for the man, not a deviation or course correction. I'm so unsurprised, although it's funny to me that he'd make such a slip-up in touting his grand plan. Either he doesn't know his history, and/or figures most Americans don't, either, or else he was just rhetorically invoking those projects as a show of how $eriou$ he is about environmental reform.

Then again, I could just as easily see an actual government-run program being used to give the concerned private industries a lock on the technologies developed at public expense.

We'll see if the market works the magic Gore wants it to. I can't help but think the way business is conducted will have to change for that to happen.