Now that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has editorially asked President Bush and Vice President Cheney to promise not to accept any profit from war in retirement, Im waiting for it to do the same with former Vice President Gore in his new status as a partner in a venture capital firm that finances alternative energy start-up companies.
Gore joined the Silicon Valley firm Kieiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, in mid-November, an event noted in stories about four inches long in the back pages of the local liberal newspapers. It was almost as if the papers didnt want much attention paid to it, since it looks as if hes trading on his Nobel laureate status to make some big bucks.
His part-time duties, according to the New York Times, which broke the story, will be to investigate the growth potential of start-up companies focused on the alternative energy factor and then weighing in on whether KPC&B should finance these companies.
Gore is quoted as saying he would donate his salary to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit policy foundation. Venture capitalist partners also typicality earn a management fee of 2 percent of the amount of money they invest, the Times said, but the potential for huge returns comes from the 20 percent they take of the profit when the startups they have supported go public or are acquired.
KPC&B declined to say whether Gore would receive a management fee or participate in profit sharing, noting that matters of compensation are private. I will pull my share of the load at Kleiner Perkins, Gore is quoted as telling an interviewer, which isnt answering the question either, But the Wall Street Journal says three of his partners are on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.
Gore was the key senator in environmental policy matters before he became veep, a position aspired to in the House by U.S. Rep Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, who has substituted the seas are rising for the sky is falling and is trying to make polar bears an endangered species. Gore is being called a political rainmaker by his new partners because his connections with Congress and his status as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate are expected to ensure federal subsidies and grants where needed, i.e. ethanol, which is heavily subsidized by the feds and needs to continue same.
The extent of his dedication to the environmental cause is questionable, since he lives in a mansion that consumes twelve times the kilowatt hours of his neighbors but pays into an energy subsidization fund to make up for it. Hes buying the right to say do as I say in energy conservation, not as I do.
The late Gov, Dixy Lee Ray called him, among other things, an environmental evangelist who is a greater danger to the American people than the waste dump at Love Canal because he not only predicates his policies and actions on rumor, unsupported charges and unscientific reports, but ignores the truth because it could counter his political aspirations. That was in her 1993 book, Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense?
She referred to him as a woolly-minded dreamer in his book Earth in the Balance and said the scientific community he consults could be extreme environmentalist groups.
Hes an extremist himself, she says, because he questioned the cutting of yew trees to yield taxol for combating certain cancers. One tree per patient was OK, but three trees per patient were too many, he said.
The P-I should ask Al Gore to forswear profits he makes from falsely blaming the peoples lifestyle for natural global warming and donate those to charity, too.

Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.