Al Gore’s 30 Years of Climate Errors: Blood & Gore

Al Gore’s 30 Years of Climate Errors: An Anniversary Analysis
Glacial Recount | Snow Job | The Scary Seas
Bridge Fuel to Nowhere | Favoring Failure | Blood & Gore
It Could Have Happened Here

Blood & Gore

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett knows which way that wind blows. In 2014 he explained to Fortune magazine that he would “do anything that is basically covered by the law” to lower the taxes paid by his investment firm.

“For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms,” continued Buffett. “That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

Buffett is a self-aware investor in weather-dependent energy who is willing to admit to the perverse incentives that he is profiting from.

Not everyone is like that, according to a different quote used in An Inconvenient Truth.

“Upton Sinclair wrote this: ‘You can’t make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it,’” said Gore, near the end of the film

He was addressing those who don’t buy into his exaggerations and climate alarmism. But he could have been speaking of himself.

In 2004, Gore and a Goldman Sachs investment manager named David Blood teamed up to form Generation Investment Management. The Blood & Gore investment firm now promotes itself as a “pure-play sustainable investment manager” that has “played a pioneering role in the development of sustainable and environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.”

ESG is the process whereby Big Money pushes big corporations into prioritizing lefty social and environmental policies. With that mission statement, the Blood & Gore firm could be renamed “WeWoke” to better explain what they’re up to.

Gore is the chairman, and Blood is the senior partner. As of June 2022, Generation Investment claimed $30 billion in customer assets under management.

Central to the Blood & Gore investment strategy is the notion that carbon-based fuels represent stranded assets—assets that will become worthless to their owners well before the currently presumed value has been depleted. In October 2013 the pair penned a Wall Street Journal opinion warning that the collapse of carbon fuel value would occur because of a combination of three pressure points: stricter government regulation, displacement by weather-dependent energy systems, and political campaigns that cause investors to flee from fossil fuels.

Although dressed up as wise investment predictions, these were really descriptions (some might say threats) of the policy agenda that Gore promotes and that his firm aims to profit from.

Gore is a reliable supporter of regulatory assaults on energy development. In July 2022, with the average retail price for a gallon of gasoline hovering near $5, he said President Joe Biden should refuse to open any additional federal land for oil and gas exploration.

Generation Investment is also a prominent investor in the weather-dependent energy firms. As noted in the Warren Buffett quote, this industry is implicitly funded by the taxpayers with billions of dollars in government tax credits and subsidies.

In November 2021, for example, Octopus Energy announced that it had inked a $600 million partnership with Generation Investment Management. Octopus claimed to be “Europe’s largest investor in solar energy, managing $4.5bn of renewable energy assets across the continent.” In a news release, the Octopus CEO praised Gore’s movies as the inspiration for the Octopus growth strategy. In return, Gore said Octopus was a “living example of the kind of company that Generation was founded to invest in.”

And if you have enough loot to call Gore in for a speech, then he’s likely to promote disinvestment from the carbon-based energy firms, an outcome favorable to the Blood & Gore investment strategy. In a 2019 commencement address to his alma mater, Harvard University (which definitely has the loot), Gore asked: “Why would Harvard University continue to support with its finances an industry like this that is in the process of threatening the future of humanity?” In a December 2021 visit to Vanderbilt University, he said he endorsed “in no uncertain terms” a proposal that the school dump its investment holdings in fossil fuel energy firms.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: When your bottom line depends upon portraying someone else as a grave threat to humanity, then it’s hard not to share that message with the next generation.

Perhaps that is the meaning behind the “Generation Investment Management” name? At the least, that’s more marketable than “Blood & Gore” might have been.

In the next installment, if Gore had become president, the United States could be freezing in the middle of its own “energy transition” like current-day Germany.