And not a token amount, either -- more than $200 million, according to Religous Intelligence:
The Church of England’s Church Commissioners have gone green, investing £150 million with former US Vice-President Al Gore’s environmentally minded investment firm, Generation Investment Management.
The First Church Estates Commissioner, Andreas Whittam Smith reported that in late September the Commissioners had placed the funds with Gore’s boutique management firm which follows an “environmentally sustainable global equities mandate.” Funding for the investment came from “cash and Treasury bills”, he said, and not from the sale of UK equities as initially planned.
The full story has a lot more details, but we don't find out how well Al Gore and David Blood's "socially responsible" investment fund, which has an asset pool of $5 billion, did during the sudden downturn since September in this year's recession. (The fund has never released its returns.)
A New York Times post from 2007 said the fund's biggest investment was in Novo Nordisk, the world's largest manufacturer of insulin, which at least at that time had advanced over thirty percent for the year.
And one has to figure the fund must have weathered the stormy economy decently, if the Anglicans are willing to sell Treasury funds to invest in it.
This news came via Drudge. It's rare to find on that ugly site an encouraging word, but Drudge even gave the story a picture of Gore speaking out, which was enjoyable to see.
Let Gore's successes gall his enemies. He deserves every bit of his fame, and in the pic below, appears to have enjoyed it with his wife Tipper when they were in Oslo (via JurgisU).
