SAN FRANCISCO - To anyone still holding out hope that Al Gore will run for president, it appears he has other interests.
The former U.S. vice-president says 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 says 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.
"It's one of the benefits of not being in the public sector anymore," he said in an interview Monday.
North American and European venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in clean-tech companies in the first half of 2007, a 10 per cent increase from the first half 2006, according to Ann Arbor, Mich.-based trade group Cleantech Network.
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