Environment Support

AL GORE'S GREEN POLITICS

Al Gore marked his name in the world of politics by initially serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1985 and then in the U.S. Senate from 1985 to 1993. He finally grabbed his highest place in the political hierarchy as the forty-fifth Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. From being a prominent political personality, he then geared his full attention to being an environmental advocate in its truest sense, eventually sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Committed to play an active part in changing the world for the better, he has quite a list of environmental endeavors:

His life

Born as Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C, to parents Albert Arnold Gore and Pauline LaFon Gore, Al Gore grew up knowing about the realm of politics, as his father was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate from 1939 until 1971. He basically spent his childhood years in Washington and Carthage, Tennessee. Gore took his secondary education at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. and he completed college education in 1969, at Harvard University. He bagged the cum laude award in his degree in B.A. in Government. In 1970, he married Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, known as Tipper, and they became parents to four children, namely: Karenna, Kristin, Sarah, and Albert III.

His Love for the Environment

In the late 1970s, Al Gore held the first congressional hearings on climate change and the call for a reduction in the emissions of greenhouse gases. From 1978 to 1979, he became a co-sponsor of hearings on toxic waste and hearings on global warming. During his tenure in Senate, he wrote an editorial in the Washington Post where he explicitly noted how humankind has gradually destroyed its natural resources.

In 1992, he attended the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, as a chairman of the U.S. Senate Delegation. The summit was yet the world's largest assembly of state leaders where the focus was on the environment. Gore also authored the book "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit", drawing a strategy in tackling the environmental crisis of the world. It became a national bestseller.

In October of 1993, along with President Bill Clinton, Gore disclosed the Global Climate Change Action Plan, a public-private partnership, which had an extensive national line of attack, working to significantly reduce the emission of harmful gases in the air to 1990 levels by the year 2000, without sacrificing economic advancement. Gore also played a crucial role in pushing the national wetlands policy, and in creating a considerable partnership between the government and industry for developing a new era of fuel-efficient vehicles.

On April 22, 1994, Al Gore launched the GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) program in celebration of Earth Day. The GLOBE project is an Internet-based program which provides students ranging from twelve to eighteen years old, an opportunity to learn about their environment. Students in sets of different sizes conduct environmental experiments in the fields of hydrology, atmosphere, soils, and land cover. They take daily measurements of the area's current environmental condition, ranging from the amount of pollutants in the nearby stream, to daily temperature, cloud cover, or any other environmental observations. The data that these students have gathered are then recorded and sent via the Internet to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's headquarters, where they collect a substantial amount of statistics from other schools around the world. The scientists from the abovementioned department would create maps and graphs on the free interactive website to analyze data sets. The end result would be a worldwide network where one can monitor and get updates of the weather conditions and environmental change patterns of any GLOBE location around the world. The GLOBE project celebrated its 10th year in 2005 and as of 2007, the project has a student base in over 19,000 schools in 110 countries.

Al Gore also worked hard to protect whale sanctuary by prohibiting commercial whaling in places where they thrive. On May 26, 1994, the International Whaling Commission agreed to construct an 11.8 million-square mile asylum in the Southern Pacific Ocean, as a feeding ground for majority of the greatest whale inhabitants. This is now known as the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

In 1998, Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol; its passage was also strongly being pushed by Gore. It called for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Sadly however, the protocol was never submitted by the Clinton administration to the Senate for its ratification.

In 2004, he established a firm known as the Generation Investment Management, to persuade companies to focus their investment methods so that it would positively impact society and the environment, particularly regarding climate change.

In 2006, Gore fore fronted the documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which is the fourth highest-grossing documentary in the history of the United States. The film garnered the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature and unveils evidences of anthropogenic global warming and its possible repercussions if no immediate actions are taken. Gore also published a book of this title, which became a bestseller, mainly talking about global warming alleviated by the use of nuclear power.

Following the success of "The Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore invited 1,000 individuals to join The Climate Project, wherein a team of scientists and educators trained them on the facts and urgency of the climate change issue. These trained individuals would present to community groups across the country, giving an adaptation of Al Gore's presentation on the unwanted effects of global warming as well as solutions for the problem that is slowly crippling the world. The goal is to increase public awareness of the climate crisis throughout the U.S. and overseas. Presently, there are 1,700 trained presenters working in 12 countries and over a thousand in the U.S. alone.

In February of 2007, Al Gore announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, which is a contest with a $25 million prize for whoever can display a commercially viable design that will result in the eradication of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases, thus contributing to the stability of the earth's climate.

Al Gore continues to be one of the stalwarts of the growing movement for environmental protection.

Al Gore Environment Resources