By Journal Register News Service

When green technology gets going, thanks to new federal government policies promoting it, folks are going to be standing in tall cotton. So says President Obama. From where Al Gore is standing, the prospects are looking especially promising.

He’s “uniquely positioned to cash in” on the Obama environmental policies such as “cap-and-trade” energy legislation, according to Capitol Research Center, a watchdog group. The center says Gore has amassed “considerable influence” over firms that hope to have a piece of the action in brokering cap-and-trade deals.

Under cap-and-trade — widely viewed as in effect a tax on electricity generation — the government would set global-warming-emissions standards and require utilities to purchase emissions permits. The government would use the receipts to subsidize green energy alternatives. Utilities that meet the standards could trade their excess emissions credits to ones that don’t.

Gore is a huge fan of the scheme, and perhaps not solely because he’s worried about melting ice and stranded polar bears. He’s a co-founder of Generation Investment Management and a partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers (KPCB). The firm reportedly has invested a billion bucks in companies poised to exploit the new environmental regulatory opportunities.

So it just might be that there’s something of the hustling salesman’s pitch in Gore’s shrill global-warming alarms, and not mere hysteria.

At a recent Senate subcommittee hearing where Gore spoke in support of the cap-and-trade legislation, he was asked whether he’s profiteering on the issue. He indignantly denied he is. Perhaps “profiteering” is too loaded a word. “Profiting” doesn’t seem so, though.

You surely can’t fault Gore for wanting to make a buck. After all, he didn’t get a single penny for inventing the Internet.

Footnote. OK, he never really said he “invented” the Internet. What he said was, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” Which was not a total exaggeration. He was indeed, as a senator, an early advocate of extending the Internet from a strictly military to civilian use.

In any event, it sounds like Gore may have to unlearn the Democratic habit of pronouncing the word “profit” with a sneer.