GIM’s roster of publicly traded U.S. holdings include successful, albeit not particularly green, companies like Amazon, EBay, Procter & Gamble Co. and Colgate-Palmolive Co. A few of the others would count in GIM parlance as green or at least sustainable investments, such as Solarcity Corp., a rooftop solar installer, and Blackbaud Inc., a software maker that helps nonprofits raise money.
Green Investing
GIM has assets under management of about $8.5 billion. Its investment strategy and returns have been impressive enough that Britain’s Environment Agency asked it to manage 7.2 percent of its 1.6 billion-pound investment portfolio through 2014. That’s up from 4.8 percent in 2009, according to documents filed with Britain’s securities regulator.
At times the company’s green investing approach hasn’t worked. In 2008, with optimism that a Democrat-controlled Congress would establish carbon controls and an international climate treaty would be extended, GIM bought a 9.6 percent stake, in Camco International Ltd., a manager of projects that reduce greenhouse gases.
By early 2010, GIM had upped its stake in the company now known as Camco Clean Energy Plc to 18.6 percent, according to documents. By October of that year, with Republicans in the House saying no to climate legislation and Kyoto Protocol talks stalled, shares in Camco were taking a beating. GIM dumped its stake. Neither company would comment on GIM’s actions.
Climate Exchange
In another instance, GIM took a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, set up in 2003 by former derivatives guru Richard Sandor to take advantage of what the exchange’s founders hoped would be a government-mandated price on carbon. The exchange ran into the same headwinds as Camco and was sold to Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange Inc. in May 2010 for $581 million. It was later shut as carbon prices fell to all- time lows.
GIM would only say that neither Camco nor Chicago Climate Exchange were profitable investments.
If emissions limits had been approved by Congress, both Camco and the exchange stood to rake in huge profits, said Dan Kish, vice president for policy with the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research, which gets funding from oil and natural gas companies.
“Al Gore is like the preacher touting his moral purity and superiority,” Kish said. “Yet it turns out that heeding his preachings is directly linked to his financial interests.”