Gore Joins Venture Capital Firm

To anyone still holding out hope that Al Gore will run for president, it appears he has potentially more lucrative interests.

The former vice president said Monday he's joining a Silicon Valley venture capital firm to guide investments that help combat global warming.

Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last month for his work on climate change, joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as it and dozens of other venture firms expand into so-called "clean-tech" investments worldwide. Gore is already a senior adviser to Google Inc. and a member of the board at Apple Inc.

The star of the Academy Award-winning global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is expected to be a high-profile, active partner at Kleiner Perkins. He would not disclose his salary but said he'll donate it to Alliance for Climate Protection, an advocacy group he co-founded that focuses on accelerating policy solutions to the climate crisis.

The donation does not include stock options. Typically, a tiny fraction of a venture capitalist's compensation is salary; the vast majority of wealth comes from sale of stock options when the companies the firm invests in are sold to the public.

"It's one of the benefits of not being in the public sector anymore," Gore said with a laugh during an interview with The Associated Press.

North American and European venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in clean-tech companies in the first half of 2007, a 10 percent increase from the first half 2006, according to Ann Arbor, Mich.-based trade group Cleantech Network.