Al Gore is an American politician and environmentalist. He was vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 2000, and the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has been involved with the environmental activist movement for a number of decades and has had full participation since he left the vice-presidency in 2001.
Childhood
Gore stated in an interview for The New York Times that his interest in environmentalism began when he was a teenager:
As I was entering high school, my mother was reading Silent Spring and the dinner table conversation was about pesticides and the environment ... The year I graduated from college the momentum was building for Earth Day. After that, as I was entering divinity school, the Club of Rome report came out and the limits to growth was a main issue.
Politics
Congress
Gore has been involved with environmental work for a number of decades. In 1976, at 28, after joining the United States House of Representatives, Gore held the "first congressional hearings on the climate change, and co-sponsor[ed] hearings on toxic waste and global warming". He continued to speak on the topic throughout the 1980s and was known as one of the Atari Democrats, later called the "Democrats' Greens, politicians who see issues like clean air, clean water and global warming as the key to future victories for their party".
In 1989, while still a Senator, Gore published an editorial in The Washington Post, in which he argued:
Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with the planet Earth. The world's forests are being destroyed; an enormous hole is opening in the ozone layer. Living species are dying at an unprecedented rate.
In 1990, Senator Gore presided over a three-day conference with legislators from over 42 countries which sought to create a Global Marshall Plan, "under which industrial nations would help less developed countries grow economically while still protecting the environment".
The Concord Monitor says that 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 greenhouse gases".
Vice presidency: 1993–2001
As Vice President, Gore was involved in a number of initiatives related to the environment. He launched the GLOBE program on Earth Day 1994, an education and science activity that, according to Forbes, "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 Protocol, 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 1998, Gore became associated with Digital Earth. He also began promoting a NASA satellite that would provide a constant view of Earth, marking the first time such an image would have been made since The Blue Marble photo from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. The "Triana" satellite would have been permanently mounted in the L1 Lagrangian Point, 1.5 million km away. This satellite would allow the measurement of the earth's changing reflectivity (albedo) due to melting ice caps, but the project was put on hold by George W. Bush's administration. The satellite was finally launched in 2015 as the Deep Space Climate Observatory.