Al Gore to become first carbon billionaire

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Washington: Former US Vice-President Al Gore, who has campaigned relentlessly on green issues, is on track to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire”amid claims of profiting from the climate change agenda.

Since he abandoned mainstream politics following his defeat in the 2000 presidential polls against George W Bush, Gore’s personal fortune has risen from £1.2 million to an estimated £60 million, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

It is claimed that the Nobel peace laureate is on course to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire”after significant investments in environmentally friendly projects like carbon trading markets, solar power, biofuels, electric vehicles, sustainable fish farming and waterless lavatories.

Global warming sceptics are not convinced about his “altruistic”climate change agenda. “Al Gore wants to become the first carbon billionaire and he is poised to do it,” Marc Morano of climatedepot.com was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

“As much as Gore’s made now, it is going to be a piker league compared to what he is going to make in five years if all these new carbon trading mandates go through,”Morano claimed.

The Democrat, who won the Nobel Prize in 2007, has also invested in non-climate change related investments, including putting money into Google and Apple, the report in the British daily said.

After “putting his money where his mouth is”for the past 30 years, Gore is on course to make handsome profit from a firm producing smart meters which monitor household electricity use, it said.

He is expected to receive a handsome return from last weeks’s announcement of £2 billion grants by the US energy department to firms in which he had earlier invested.

Gore had an heated argument over his investments with Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn during an earlier hearing this year on clean energy legislation.

Gore said it was “certainly not true”that he was going to become a “carbon billionaire”.

“I am proud to put my money where my mouth is for the past 30 years. And though that is not the majority of my business activities, I absolutely believe in investing in accordance with my beliefs and my values,”he said.