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
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 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 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.
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.
The carbon fuels industry-big oil and coal-have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party and they are drilling it for everything it's worth.
There's no such thing as clean coal. It's non-existent. Theoretically, it might be possible, many years from now, to come up with a way to clean it as it's burnt. But there's not a single demonstration project in the United States. Clean coal doesn't exist.
...2009 saw the eighth 'ten-year flood' of Fargo, North Dakota, since 1989. In Iowa, Cedar Rapids was hit last year by a flood that exceeded the 500-year flood plain. All-time flood records are being broken in areas throughout the world.
As I have said for many years throughout this land, we're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.