I am starting to find that Big Green is like one of those “magic eye” puzzles. The closer you look at it, the more you see… But it gives you a splitting headache in the process. However, what you see is not always what you expected to see, and Big Green is no exception to that.

I have studied economics and even entertained the idea of going to school and becoming an economist for a while. I also fancy myself as an amateur investor and have a pretty good grasp of the equity and commodities markets. As such, much of what I find in Big Green makes sense to me - but certailny goes above the heads of the average population, which I fear is one of Big Green’s biggest strengths right now. They are literally banking on the fact that the general public knows nothing about their financial operations and are being hoodwinked by the pop-culture green movement as forced upon them by Al Gore, Hollywood and the media. But let me tell you, things are not always what they seem.

While I addressed Al Gore and Generation Investment Management in part 1, the trail of Big Green does not end there; but it is a good starting point. It got me looking at what else Generation is involved in, which pointed me to the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The CCX is a carbon trading system set up like other commodity trading systems like the CBOT or NYMEX. It allows organizations to join the exchange and then buy and sell carbon offsets on a market. Since carbon is being handled like any other commodity, it doesn’t have a fixed price. Curious. Why would “saving the environment” be a commodity? It makes no sense. Carbon trading should have nothing to do with supply and demand.

But there is always more here than meets the eye, and this Big Green project reeks of money instead of environmentalism. Essentially how the system works is that entities that produce less carbon than the target threshold can sell their excess carbon allotments to entities who produce more carbon than the target, hence supposedly “offsetting” the difference.

So now you have a system that has virtually nothing to do with environmentalism, and like any other commodity trading, you need brokers and aggregators and people who make money off the redistribution of carbon and capital. Enter Generation Investment Management. Since GIM is a member of CCX, but isn’t actually a carbon emitting entity in itself, we can assume that they are an aggragator (small entities cannot trade on their own and have to go through an aggregator if they deal in less than 10,000 tons of carbon). This is further evidenced by the fact that Al Gore buys his own carbon credits through GIM. Since GIM has no transparency in its business, it’s hard to say how much they deal in carbon, but we can bet it’s significant. Also of interest is the fact that Goldman Sachs owns 9.31% of CCX’s parent company, and 3 out of 6 founding partners of Generation have ties to Goldman Sachs.

Then there is Google, which had me stumped for a short time. What did Al Gore have to do with Google? Then I found that Google has a nonprofit arm called Google.org, which has a massive amount of money flowing into it through Google, Inc. After all, Google infused the .org side with over a billion dollars worth of stock as well as 1% of their yearly income. According to their 2006 990 form, they are worth nearly $87 million.

But what does this have to do with Gore? Well, there is the $5.1 million dollar donation to the Acumen Fund, which happens to have Generation’s number two man, David Blood, on their board and has projects that include global renewable energy programs and solar lighting. There’s also a $500,000 donation to TechnoServe, which is working on biofuel facilities in Mozambique and Guatemala.

There is also the World Resources Institute, which Al Gore also happens to be a director of. This organization is an environmental “think tank” worth over $55 million and has a donors list that includes Generation, Google, and the United Nations. Interestingly, aside from the $10 million that went into salaries and benefits (plus another million in travel), I can’t actually figure out how they spend their money. According to their 990 form, they spend a whole lot of time developing strategies for climate and pollution programs, ecosystem and people programs etc. But they do have nearly $40 million in investments, which includes $18 million in LLC partnerships (which means they have $18 million invested in private companies) which they do not disclose. Personally I am dying to know what that $40 million is invested in, but they do not disclose those details nor do they have any SEC filings (which means they hide their tracks).

And finally there is Gore’s pet project, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which has the least amount of transparency of any organization I have ever seen. They do not provide any information on their website regarding their donors or finances nor have they responded to any of my requests for information or for a copy of their 990 form. I do know this much, though: Not only does Al Gore chair this organization, he also donates to these guys and gets to deduct the donations from his taxes. So when he donated his Nobel prize money (wasn’t that nice of him?) he was actually getting not only a tax write off, but the money went right back into his own organization!

So just what has Al Gore gained from his Big Green escapades? According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. While I ordinarily would applaud such financial gains from such a short period of time, I can’t help but to question just how it happened. When you look out at what Al Gore has done, it’s evident that he figured out on a way to capitalize on the creation of Big Green while becoming the official doomsday prophet that has helped to build Big Green into the monetary powerhouse that it has become.

In any other industry this would be considered a severe conflict of interest. In essence, Al Gore has helped to create a fictitious catastrophe, then told everybody what the solutions have to be, and then put himself in a position to capitalize on the hype. It’s not only seriously dishonest, but many people and industries are going to suffer in the wake of this hype while Gore and Big Green bring in millions (and in some cases, billions) of dollars in green money.

Big Green has long since evolved past any resemblance of environmentalism and has become nothing more than a multi-billion dollar money-making machine. It’s time to start asking just who (or what) benefits from the pop-culture green movement because it certainly isn’t the environment. Even the real environmental groups are now backing away from the Big Green golden calves such as biofuels and carbon trading, as they have realized that these things will not help the environment and are nothing more than money-making schemes that are exploiting environmentalism as a tool to push their wares.

It’s time to wake up, people. We need to stop Big Green and this false environmentalism before we all become victims of this dishonesty and greed. We need to end this now.