Now Introducing...

Name: Albert Arnold Gore

Source: Wikipedia

D.O.B: March 31^st, 1948

Occupation: Politician – 45^th Vice President of the United States, serving under President Bill Clinton

Interests & Hobbies: The Environment – Gore is an extremely influential environmental activist and author, his most popular publication is “An Inconvenient Truth” (to be discussed in a future post). He has set up a several organisations for climate change including the Alliance for Climate Protection. In addition to several other ventures, including roles within Apple and Google, Gore plays the role as head of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byres climate change solutions group.

Awards: Nobel Peace Prize – this was awarded to Gore based on his work in activism for climate change

Environmentalism

For the purpose of this blog post we will only be looking briefly at the work of Gore in Environmentalism in Politics. It can be seen that Gore was one of the first politicians to really appreciate the severity of climate change and sought to change things big time for the US. As a Senator, he over ran a three day long conference with 42 nations to create a “Global Marshall Plan” to see the continued development of developing nations while focusing on protecting the environment in the process. (Shabecoff, 1993) As Vice President, Gore was able to up his game. He launched the first world Earth Day in 1994 and was the leading American politician to push for the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s.

Since the end of his time at the senate, Gore has focused on several projects, including the following…

·         Generation Investment Management – Chairman of the company that works to set up environmentally friendly portfolios

·         We Can Solve It – a company dedicated to the publication and increasing awareness of climate change through the internet and petitions for the national press to put more focus on environmental issues

·         Lectures and Conferences – where Gore himself has gone to speak publically about the importance of climate change

·         The open encouragement of civil disobedience to stop coal plants being built

·         The Climate Reality Project – Gore joined together his two main climate change endeavours (The Alliance for Climate Change Protection and The Climate Project) to form this project in 2011.

It’s rewarding to see an American politician so dedicated to the environment and maybe the world would be in a bit of a better state should the whole of the Senate follow Al Gore’s lead. Over the next few posts I will be exploring some of the publications and work of Al Gore in more detail but hope this provided a nice introduction to the man himself!