Al Gore & Silicon Valley Jump Start Renewable Energy

You may not be familiar with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. But you know Gore.

Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize/Emmy/Oscar winner and former Democratic presidential candidate, is broadening his business portfolio by joining the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. (Full disclosure: William Randolph Hearst III, a board member of the Hearst Corp., which lets The Daily Green live and breathe, is also a partner in the firm.)

No surprise here: The firm will focus on investing in "green tech and clean tech," as Gore put it to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Advocates for strict government caps on greenhouse gas emissions, see this type of capitalistic reaction as the solution to the problem: Make it expensive to emit carbon, and you fuel innovation in technologies that don't emit carbon.

Gore's many critics, of course, will see some conspiracy here: The man who tours the world advocating for Draconian government regulation is now cashing in.

Anyone who's immersed him or herself in the science of global warming would know that argument doesn't hold much water. Further proof: Gore's giving his salary to the Alliance for Climate Protection, the same group that gets the proceeds of just about all Gore's climate work, including his share of the Nobel Peace Prize award.

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