Global campaigner and investment sidekick call for 'sustainable capitalism'
For a man with the very survival
of human civilisation weighing heavily on his broad shoulders, Al Gore cuts a surprisingly
relaxed figure. With a Diet Coke in hand, and chewing gum rolling around inside
his mouth, one of the great "what ifs" of modern political history
strolls into the boardroom of his London-based asset management firm, located
in one of the city's "most environmentally friendly buildings".
Gore is in the capital, as he is
every few months, to spend a couple of days meeting with his partners at Generation
Investment Management, the "sustainability-driven" asset management
firm he set up in 2004 with David Blood, who, as the former chief executive of
Goldman Sachs Asset Management, once managed investments worth $325bn (£232bn).
As is the case everywhere, the numbers are somewhat smaller these days, but the
firm they both wanted to call Blood and Gore (sadly, it was overruled by the
rest of the board) still manages a pot of investments worth billions, according
to Blood.
As chairman,
Gore, 61, says he spends about "one day a week" working for
Generation, but his press handlers won't expand on what investments he holds or
remuneration he receives, other than to say he initially used his own money to
"experiment with" in trial investments during the two-year period
when the company's "structure and philosophy" was being established
ahead of any outside investors being invited to join them. It is tempting to
see Gore's role at Generation as the day job, allowing him the time and
financial security to spend the rest of the working week on his
three-decade-long quest to warn the world about the perils of climate change.
But he insists that his role at Generation is as important as any of his other
high-profile projects.
Blood and Gore couldn't have
picked a more apt time to agree to talk about their vision of "sustainable
capitalism", with the global economy and the planet's environmental health
in twin decline. What they are keen to prove, they say, is that the
short-termism of a market "driven by quarterly reports" is
unsustainable. "The focus on short-termism has reached a ridiculous
extreme," says Gore. "The business cycle is much longer than that and
some investments take much longer to reveal their full value and
profitability." They have chosen a three-year period in which to judge
investments, though "many people would say is still too short", says
Gore.
This view broadly chimes with the
now widespread call for a "green new deal", as reflected in the raft
of environmental measures embedded within many of the national economic
stimulus packages announced around the world. But this promised new dawn is
also widely predicted to be one in which the heavy hand of regulation will loom
large. "Yes, we're going to need more regulation," says Blood.
"Yes, raw capitalism failed us. That shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.
But we also have an opportunity to create a green economy. To
put a price on carbon, through tax or cap-and-trade, or both. That is an
important step to making economics sustainable."
But the European carbon market is
in disarray, with the price of carbon at such low levels that it now arguably
rewarding the big polluters. Earlier this week, the environmental scientist
James Lovelock said carbon trading was a "scam".
"The European trading system
got off to a bad start, but they have addressed those flaws and made it work
much better," Gore responds. "The fundamental problems are that it's
like a bucket with a large hole in it because the US and
Gore says that, since the
election of Barack Obama last November, he feels much more bullish about the
chances of political progress in tackling climate change. But one group who are
unlikely to ever "get it" are the ever-vocal contingent of climate
change sceptics, the most prominent of whom were gathered at a conference this
week in New York. Al Gore, the world's best-known climate change
"alarmist", as the sceptics like to say, was a popular source of ridicule
and ire at the conference. Gore brackets the sceptics with those who believe in
creationism: "It's fed by a huge amount of funding from carbon special
interests who have been financing these phoney,
pseudo-scientific reports and they have a self-interest in sowing doubt. Doubt
is their product.
"It's also fed by an
ideological opposition and, coming out of the 20th century, the battle against
excess statism in various forms became a deeply held view, and I share that
view if it's stated properly, but some take it to such an extreme that anything
which implies a new regulation or a new role for government is automatically
attacked."