Al Gore
Al Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore Jr.is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Chosen as Clinton's running mate in their successful 1992 campaign, he was reelected in 1996. At the end of Clinton's second term, Gore was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in 2000. After leaving office, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth31 March 1948
CountryUnited States of America
We ought to approach this challenge [of global warming] with a sense of profound joy and gratitude: that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
What's at risk [in 100 years] if we do not take action, truly is the survival of civilization as we know it... Literally that is the case. We have seen global warming so far of just a little bit less than one degree Celsius and look at what's happened. Superstorm Sandy. Boulder Colorado. All these fires. Hurricane Irene one year before.
America's political system has evolved over the last 50 years in ways that have enhanced the power of business lobbies.
I flew on Air Force Two for eight years, and now I have to take off my shoes to get on an aeroplane.
I was in elective politics for 24 years. I've made four national races, two for President, two for Vice President. I have found there are other ways to serve, and I'm enjoying them.
The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.
The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.
Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.
I wrote newspaper articles professionally for seven years, and I love newspapers. I'm hopeful that new business models will emerge that allow the newspaper culture to genuinely thrive in the digital age.
The climate, financial and national security crises are all connected. They share the same cause: Our [the USA's] absurd dependency on foreign oil. As long as we need to spend billions of dollars each year to buy foreign oil from state-run oil companies in the Persian Gulf, our problems of a trade deficit, a budget deficit and a climate crisis will persist.
Speaking from my own religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full.
The ten hottest years in the atmospheric record, going back only 160 years, have been in the last eleven years.
If there is no cost to be paid for the indiscriminate dumping of pollution into the earth's atmosphere, then it should be a surprise to no one that today we will dump another 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet. ... We have to [act] this year, not next year. Mother Nature does not do bailouts.