Gore - "What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, [View All]

[Dover]

the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan".


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From the Fortune article:

Al Gore's next act: Planet-saving VC

The recovering politician is teaming with a legendary venture capitalist and bigtime moneyman to make over the $6 trillion global energy business.

...snip...

Already they've begun to pool information. Generation came across a small company engaged in carbon trading that Kleiner is analyzing, and Kleiner has shared intelligence about which startups could threaten the established companies in Generation's portfolio. In the long term, though, they want to help drive something much larger, "bigger than the Industrial Revolution and significantly faster," as Gore puts it.

They argue that to halt global warming, nothing less will be required than a makeover of the $6 trillion global energy business. Coal plants, gas stations, the internal-combustion engine, petrochemicals, plastic bags, even bottled water will have to give way to clean, green, sustainable technologies. "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," Gore continues. "It'd be promising too much to say we can do it on our own, but we intend to do our part."

Does that sound grandiose? Sure. Will they be accused of being partisan? Probably. Is there something incongruous about globetrotting rich guys jetting between multiple homes and lecturing the rest of us about climate change? Of course.

But there are good reasons to take Gore and Doerr seriously. Gore, who never seemed fully at ease as a presidential candidate, has demonstrated a real knack for using mass communications to influence public opinion. (He estimates that he's shown his homespun slide show on global warming more than 1,000 times, while the documentary version, An Inconvenient Truth, won him an Oscar.) Doerr, meanwhile, has displayed a real talent for deploying venture capital to create or disrupt whole industries.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/11/news/newsmakers/gore_kleiner.fortune/index.htm