Environmental and Energy Business Resources

"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 Vietnam, as I was entering divinity school, the Club of Rome report came out and the limits to growth was a main issue" - 1989 interview with New York Times

Early Life and Politics

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. was born on March 31, 1948, and is the son of the late U.S. Senator Albert Gore, Sr. and Pauline Gore. Raised in Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., Al Gore received a degree in government with honors from Harvard University in 1969. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam. Returning to civilian life, Al Gore became an investigative reporter with The Tennessean in Nashville. He attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Vanderbilt Law School.

Al Gore began his career in public service in 1976 when he was elected to represent Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977-1985). He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and was re-elected in 1990 (1985-993). A candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 1988, he won more than three million votes and Democratic contests in seven states.

Al Gore was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993. President Clinton and Vice President Gore were re-elected to a second term in 1996, and Vice President Gore was sworn in again on January 20, 1997. Together, they have led United States of America into the longest period of sustained economic growth in American history -- marked by 22 million new jobs, and real incomes rising for the first time in a generation. Vice President Gore serves as an advisor to President Clinton, a Cabinet member, President of the U.S. Senate, a member of the National Security Council, and head of a wide range of Administration initiatives.

Vice President Gore is married to the former Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Aitcheson. They have four children: Karenna; Kristin, Sarah, and Albert III.

Gore was the Democratic nominee for president in the 2000 US election, ultimately losing to the Republican candidate George W. Bush in spite of winning the popular vote. A legal controversy over the Florida election recount was eventually settled in favor of Bush by the Supreme Court.

Al Gore and the Environment

 A prominent environmental activist, Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for the "efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." He also starred in the Academy Award - winning documentary on the topic of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007, Gore helped to organize the July 7 benefit concert for global warming, Live Earth.

According to 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. 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." Gore also wrote Earth in the Balance (which was published in 1992) while his six-year-old son Albert was recovering from a serious accident. 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.

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 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 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 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. During this time, he also became associated with Digital Earth.

In 2004, Gore launched Generation Investment Management. This firm, which he chairs, seeks out companies which take a responsible view on global issues such as climate change. It was created to assist the growing demand for an investment style that can bring returns by blending traditional equity research with a focus on more intangible non-financial factors such as social and environmental responsibility and corporate governance.

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. His speaking fee is $100,000. 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. In "An Inconvenient Truth" Gore calls for people to conserve energy.

In 2007, Al Gore was the main non-official representative for the United States in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, which is a series of discussions that plans to continue where the Kyoto Protocol left off when it expires in 2012. He used a famous World War II Poem written by Pastor Martin Niemller to describe how the international community is eerily accomplishing nothing in the face of the greatest crisis in human history. He ended the speech using his famous tag line: "However, political will is a renewable resource."

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 that results in the removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Gore starred in the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, released on May 24, 2006. The film documents the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and warns of the consequences of people not making immediate changes to their behavior. It is the fourth-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history.

After An Inconvenient Truth was nominated and won the 2007 Academy Award for documentary feature. Gore also published a book of the same title, which became a bestseller. In reference to the use of nuclear power to mitigate global warming, Gore has stated, "Nuclear energy is not the panacea for tackling global warming."

Al Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri. The award was given on October 12, 2007:

"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"

Al Gore and Pachauri accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2007.

On 22 April 2008 (Earth Day), Gore will release his new book, The Path to Survival. A sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, the book has been described by its publisher as explaining, "how making bold choices now to protect our environment will also create new jobs, propel sustainable economic improvements, and inspire a new generation to tackle our most challenging issues with moral leadership."

Al Gore is currently chairman of the Emmy Award - winning 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, chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, and a partner in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading that firm's climate change solutions group.

(Sources: Wikipedia; Nobel Prize website)