Gore Offers 'Sustainable Capitalism' as Night-Vision Goggles for Investors

"Bear with me,” Al Gore said to a rapt crowd of about 200 last Monday night at the fourth annual U.S.-India Energy Partnership Summit in Washington. He was asking the audience’s indulgence as he offered a scientific analogy to describe his investment philosophy.

Traditional investors focus on a narrow part of the spectrum of value that any company, or economy, produces, he said. Mainstream accounting in that way is like visible light. It’s all that eyes can see but makes up just 2 percent of the complete electromagnetic spectrum, the band of radiation that extends from high-powered gamma and x-rays to microwave and radio frequencies.