Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist. Gore served in the United States House of Representatives (1977–85) and the United States Senate (1985–93) representing Tennessee. From 1993 to 2001, he was the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States, under Bill Clinton.
Gore was the Democratic nominee for President in the 2000 election, which was one of the most controversial elections in American history. After a series of voting discrepancies and court challenges in the state of Florida the United States Supreme Court, with its final ruling on Bush v. Gore, stopped ongoing ballot recounts, giving George W. Bush the electoral college victory, and consequently the presidency.
Today, Gore is president of the American television channel Current TV, chairman of Generation Investment Management, a director on the board of Apple Inc., an unofficial advisor to Google's senior management, and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Gore lectures widely on the topic of global warming, which he calls "the climate crisis", and in 2006 starred in the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, discussing global warming and the environment. Under his leadership, one of Gore's organizations, Save Our Selves, organized the benefit concert Live Earth in an effort to raise awareness about climate change. The concert was held all over the world on July 07, 2007 (07.07.07). In July 2007, he announced teaming with actress Cameron Diaz for a TV climate contest 60 Seconds to Save the Earth to gain people's support in solving the climate crisis.
Gore's 2007 book, The Assault on Reason, is an analysis of what he calls the "emptying out of the marketplace of ideas" in civic discourse which, according to Gore, is due to the influence of electronic media, especially television, and which endangers American democracy; but he also expresses the belief that the Internet can revitalize and ultimately "redeem the integrity of representative democracy."
While Gore has frequently stated that "I'm not planning to be a candidate again," there is frequent speculation that he may run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
Political career (1976–2000)
Congressional service
When Congressman Joe L. Evins announced his retirement after 30 years, Gore quit law school in March 1976 to run for the United States House of Representatives, in Tennessee's fourth district. Gore defeated Stanley Rogers in the Democratic primary, then ran unopposed in the general election and was elected to his first Congressional post. He was re-elected three times, in 1978, 1980, and 1982. In 1984, Gore successfully ran for a seat in the United States Senate, which had been vacated by Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker. Gore served as a Senator from Tennessee until 1993, when he became Vice President.
While in Congress, Gore was a member of the following committees: Armed Services (Defense Industry and Technology Projection Forces and Regional Defense; Strategic Forces and Nuclear Deterrence); Commerce, Science and Transportation (Communications; Consumer; Science, Technology and Space- chairman 1992; Surface Transportation; National Ocean Policy Study); Joint Committee on Printing; Joint Economic Committee; and Rules and Administration.
On March 19, 1979, Gore became the first person to appear on C-SPAN, making a speech in the House chambers.[17] In the late 1980s, Gore introduced the Gore Bill, which was later passed as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. The bill was one of the most important pieces of legislation directly affecting the expansion of the internet.
Opposition to U.S. government support of Saddam Hussein
While Senator, Gore twice attempted to get the U.S. government to pull the plug on support to Saddam Hussein, citing Hussein's use of poison gas, support of terrorism, and his burgeoning nuclear program, but was opposed both times by the Bush-Reagan and Bush-Quayle administrations. In the wake of the Al-Anfal Campaign, during which Hussein staged deadly mustard and nerve gas attacks on Kurdish Iraqis, Gore cosponsored the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988 which would have cut all assistance to Iraq. The bill was defeated in part due to intense lobbying of Congress by the Bush-Reagan White House and a veto threat from President Reagan. Gore's positions as a Senator with regard to Iraq would later become an issue in his 1992 campaign for Vice President.
1988 Presidential election
Main article: Al Gore presidential campaign, 1988
Gore ran for President in the 1988 United States presidential election, but failed to obtain the Democratic nomination, which went to Michael Dukakis. During the campaign, Gore's strategy involved skipping the Iowa caucus and putting little emphasis on the New Hampshire Primary in order to concentrate his efforts on the South. He won Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee in the Super Tuesday primaries but dropped out of the presidential race in April after a poor showing in the New York primary.
On April 3, 1989, Gore's six-year-old son Albert was nearly killed in an automobile accident while leaving the Baltimore Orioles' opening day game. Because of the resulting lengthy healing process, his father chose to stay near him during the recovery instead of laying the foundation for a presidential primary campaign. Gore started writing Earth in the Balance, his book on environmental conservation, during his son's recovery. It became the first book written by a sitting Senator to make The New York Times bestseller list since John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.
Promoting environmental awareness
Gore has been called many epithets like the 'Noah of Modern Times', the EnvironmentAl Evangelist etc for his role in bringing the problem of global warming to the attention of Americans and other citizens. According to a February 27, 2007 article in The Concord Monitor, "Gore was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of climate change and to call for a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases. He held the first congressional hearings on the subject in the late 1970s."During his tenure in Congress, Gore co-sponsored hearings on toxic waste in 1978–79, and hearings on global warming in the 1980s.
On Earth Day 1994, Gore launched the GLOBE program, an education and science activity that, according to Forbes magazine, "made extensive use of the Internet to increase student awareness of their environment".
In the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Treaty, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.He was opposed by the Senate, which passed unanimously (95-0) the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States".On November 12, 1998, Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.
In recent years, Gore has remained busy traveling the world speaking and participating in events mainly aimed towards global warming awareness and prevention. His keynote presentation on global warming has received standing ovations, and he has presented it at least 1,000 times according to his monologue in An Inconvenient Truth.
Gore is a vocal proponent of carbon neutrality, buying a carbon offset each time he travels by aircraft.Gore and his family drive hybrid vehicles.
Interest in Al Gore's speeches reached such a point that a public lecture at University of Toronto on February 21, 2007, on the topic of global warming, led to a crash of the ticket sales website within minutes of opening.A few weeks later, he spoke at another event in the same city and, for the first time, made the argument that employers have a significant role to play in mobilizing their employees to take action on climate change.
During Global Warming Awareness Month, on February 9, 2007, Al Gore and Richard Branson announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, a competition offering a $25 million prize for the first person or organization to produce a viable design which results in the removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
On July 7, 2007, Live Earth benefit concerts were held around the world in an effort to raise awareness about climate change. The event was the brainchild of both Gore and Kevin Wall of Save Our Selves.
Gore starred in the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.The Oscar was awarded to director Davis Guggenheim, who asked Gore to join him and other members of the crew on stage. During this time, Gore gave a brief speech: "My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It's not a political issue; it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."
The film, released on May 24, 2006, documents the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and warns of the consequences of people not making immediate changes to their behavior. In late July, it surpassed Bowling for Columbine as the third-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history.Gore also published a book of the same title, which became a bestseller.
Gore has made also made numerous appearances in popular culture related to environmentalism. He appeared twice on Saturday Night Live, hosting on December 14, 2002 (episode #533) and May 13, 2006 (episode #603). In an opening sketch, Gore is in a parallel Earth in which he won the 2000 Presidential race. Gore describes the state of the nation: global warming has been stopped; gasoline costs 19¢ a gallon; George W. Bush is Baseball Commissioner; welfare and Social Security have been reformed and America now enjoys universal health care; Gore helped develop an anti-hurricane/tornado machine; and the federal surplus is down to eleven trillion dollars. Gore also appeared on the Weekend Update sketch and engaged in a debate on global warming with Amy Poehler.
Gore has twice appeared as a guest star on the television series Futurama, for which his daughter Kristin was a writer from 2001-2003. During the course of his 2000 presidential campaign, Gore cited Futurama and The Simpsons as his two favorite popular culture shows During the opening sequence in The Simpsons episode "A Tale of Two Springfields" for his chalkboard gag Bart writes on the chalkboard "I will not plant subliminal messagores". This episode first aired two days before the 2000 Presidential Election. Futurama producer David X. Cohen noticed these remarks in print and offered Gore the chance to appear in the 2000 season finale, Anthology of Interest I. In this episode, Gore led his team of "Vice Presidential Action Rangers" in their goal to protect the space-time continuum.
In 2002, Gore appeared again on Futurama in the episode Crimes of the Hot, voicing his own preserved head in a jar.Gore is initially introduced by Van who states: "Thank you all for coming. It is my pleasure to introduce the host of the Kyoto Global Warming Convention. The inventor of the environment and first Emperor of the Moon: Al Gore."[74] Gore then offers his own introduction in which he says: "My fellow Earthicans, as I discuss in my book Earth in the Balance and the much more popular Harry Potter and the Balance of Earth, we need to defend our planet against pollution. As well as dark wizards."Gore later used a short clip from this episode to explain how global warming works in his presentations and in An Inconvenient Truth.
Gore's willingness to poke fun at himself on the show was later cited by pundits as an example of the way he re-invented the purportedly stiff and emotionless persona that he had displayed in public before his electoral loss in 2000.In a review of the episode, Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz called it a "groundbreaking role" and suggested that it was "post-election reemergence ... as carefully choreographed as a political campaign".
Gore will reprise the role in the upcoming December 2007 film, Futurama: Bender's Big Score.
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