Al Gore
Al Gore was Vice-President of the United States for eight years, lost the closest presidential election in modern American history, and then won a Nobel Peace Prize for climate advocacy. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1948, the son of a senator from Tennessee, he was raised between a Washington hotel and the family farm, and studied government at Harvard, where a course with the oceanographer Roger Revelle first showed him rising carbon dioxide measurements. He enlisted and served in Vietnam as an army journalist, then worked as a reporter for The Tennessean before entering Congress in 1977 and the Senate in 1985. He held some of the first congressional hearings on climate change and on toxic waste, and sponsored the 1991 act funding the network expansion that produced the Mosaic browser — the basis of his later, garbled claim about the internet. He ran for president in 1988 and became Bill Clinton's running mate in 1992, taking an unusually substantive role in technology, environment and reinventing government, and negotiating the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The 2000 election came down to Florida. On election night the networks called the state for Gore, then for Bush, then retracted. After a thirty-six-day recount fight, the Supreme Court halted the count in Bush v. Gore, and Bush took the state by 537 votes. Gore won the national popular vote by about half a million. He conceded and, as president of the Senate, personally presided over the certification of his own defeat. He turned to climate full-time. An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006, reached a mass audience, and he shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: vice_president
