This Article is continued from Part 1
A Biography of Al Gore
2008 presidential
election plans
Gore & his family have commented upon whether or not Gore
would participate as a candidate in the 2008 presidential election. Gore was quoted
in December 2006 as stating on NBC's "Today": "I am not planning
to run for president again [...] I haven't completely ruled it out." His
son, Albert Gore III, followed with a comment in the 14 December 2006 article
"Albert Gore: Dad's Doing Well, Not Running in 2008": "I know that
[my father] has no plans to run in 2008 [...] Well, I guess I have to add his
addendum. I think the way he always says it is, 'I don't see any circumstances
under which I would run for president."
Despite stating that he is not planning to run, Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign chairwoman in the 2000 campaign, made a series of cryptic comments during a speech on January 31, 2007,at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania stating "Wait till Oscar night, I tell people: 'I'm dating. I haven't fallen in love yet. On Oscar night, if Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows.'" The meaning of these remarks became more clear when on award night, while in attendance & acting as a presenter for an award, Gore began a speech that seemed to be leading up to an announcement that he would run for president. However, background music drowned him out & he was escorted offstage, thus implying it was a pre-rehearsed gag.
After An Inconvenient Truth won two Academy Awards, The Agence France-Presse noted on 26 February 2007 that:"Many analysts believe he could yet enter the 2008 race for the White House although Gore has repeatedly said he is unlikely to run for office." In addition in the 26 February 2007 edition of The Nation, John Nichols notes of Gore's speech at the Academy Awards:
No, Al Gore did not
make any major announcements Sunday night. But he certainly did not still speculation
about the prospect that he might yet enter the 2008 presidential race. The former
vice president was never going to use the Academy Awards ceremony as a launching
pad for a third presidential bid. In fact, no one familiar with the man could
have imagined him even pondering such a stunt.
Others have expressed an interest
in seeing Gore run in 2008. According to the 6 February 2007 issue of The Santa
Barbara Independent, when Gore received The Sir David Attenborough Award for Excellence
in Nature Filmmaking at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on February
2, director James Cameron (who presented him with the award) stated: "Mr.
Gore, I beseech you, for the sake of our children, to run for President",
Furthermore, the 8 February 2007 edition of The Washington Post notes in the article
Supporters Push Gore to Run in 2008, "Veterans of Al Gore's past are quietly
assembling a campaign to draft the former vice president into the 2008 presidential
race _ despite his repeated statements that he's not running [...] In 2002, Gore
asked [Dylan] Malone, to stop a draft effort he had begun; Malone did. Malone
started up again & , so far, Gore hasn't waved him off." In the 14 February
2007 article Why Al Gore Won't Let the Rumors Die for the New York Observer, Steve
Kornacki notes, "It’s too much to say that Al Gore has decided to run
for President in 2008. But it does seem that he wants to preserve the option."
As of 2007, Gore's popularity has increased among progressives & supporters of the Democratic Party since his loss to George W. Bush following the close 2000 election. Gore received 68% of support among potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidates on a May 2006 Daily Kos poll & 35% on July 13, 2006 AlterNet poll. A Gallup poll of August 2006 showed that nearly half of Americans currently view Gore favorably (48 percent to 45 percent). A CNN telephone poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation of registered or independent leaning Democrats in November 2006 has Gore with 14% support in a theoretical multi-candidate Democratic primary. A poll of Democratic Iowa voters in light of the 2008 Iowa Caucus put Gore at 7%.
Private citizen
Visiting professor & honors
Following
his election loss, Gore accepted visiting professorships at Columbia University's
Graduate School of Journalism, Middle Tennessee State University, UCLA, &
Fisk University.
On March 22, 2007, Gore was awarded an honorary doctorate by Concordia University during the Youth Action Montreal's Youth Summit on Climate Change in Quebec, Canada.
Nobel Prize nomination
In early 2007, Børge
Brende, a former minister of environment & then of trade in Norway, told The
Associated Press that he & political opponent Heidi Sørensen, both
members of Norway's Storting, had nominated Al Gore for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
for his efforts to draw the world's attention to the dangers of global warming.
Norwegian lawmakers are among the thousands of people & groups with rights
to nominate Nobel candidates.
The secretive Nobel committee never comments on specific nominations, but members often note that anyone can be nominated. In 2006 there were 191 nominations for the prize.
Investment firm
In
late 2001, Al Gore became Vice Chairman of Los Angeles financial firm Metropolitan
West Financial LLC. In late 2004, Gore launched an investment firm Generation
Investment Management, which he chairs, to seek out companies taking a responsible
view on big global issues like climate change. It was created to assist the growing
demand for an investment style which can bring returns by blending traditional
equity research with a focus on more intangible non-financial factors such as
social & environmental responsibility & corporate governance.
Television
network
On May 4, 2004, INdTV Holdings, a company co-founded by Gore &
Joel Hyatt, purchased cable news channel NewsWorld International from Vivendi
Universal. The new network will not have political leanings, Gore said, but will
serve as an "independent voice" for a target audience of people between
18 & 34 "who want to learn about the world in a voice they recognize
& a view they recognize as their own." The network was relaunched under
the name Current TV on August 1, 2005.
The Digital Earth Vision
Digital
Earth was the label given to a visionary concept, made popular in 1998 by former
US Vice-President, Al Gore, for describing a virtual representation of the Earth
on the Internet that is spatially referenced & interconnected with the world’s
digital knowledge archives. In a speech prepared for the California Science Center
in Los Angeles on January 31, 1998, Mr. Gore articulated a digital future where
a young girl could sit before a computer generated 3-dimensional spinning Earth
& access information from around the planet with vast amounts of scientific,
natural, & cultural information to describe, entertain, & understand the
Earth & its human activities. This vision states that any citizen of the planet,
linked through the Internet, should be able to access vast amounts of free information
in this virtual world, however, a vast commercial marketplace of products &
services was envisioned to co-exist.
Digital Earth continues to evolve along two distinct lines of organization constructs. One construct is through a growing & deliberate global partnership of NGOs, educators, business, & government leaders collaborating together with the goal of enabling for future generations unprecedented technical & educational facilities for exploring the Earth, better understanding its systems, & investigating the impact of human activities. This Digital Earth community has dedicated itself to building a global community promoting down-to-Earth solutions based on cooperative use of standards, databases, & tools. Four international symposia (see International Symposium on Digital Earth) have been held around the world representing this community, with the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth scheduled to be held in San Francisco during June of 2007. Other nations have been aggressively proposing to host the bi-annual ISDE conferences as a reflection of the nation’s interest in Digital Earth. Recently, an Israeli author published the novel Global Dawn that provides an overview of the early initiatives to create a Digital Earth community in Israel for the Middle East countries.
Promoting environmental awareness
Gore
giving his global warming talk on 7 April 2006According to a 27 February 2007
article in The Concord Monitor, "Gore was one of the first politicians to
grasp the seriousness of climate change & to call for a reduction in emissions
of carbon dioxide & 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, & hearings on global
warming in the 1980s.
As Vice President, Gore was a proponent for environmental protection. On Earth Day 1994, Gore launched the worldwide GLOBE program, a hands-on, school-based education & science activity that made extensive use of the Internet to increase student awareness of their environment & contribute research data for scientists.
In the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Treaty, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. However, many of these proposals were not enacted by Congress, & /or were not implemented to the satisfaction of critics such as Ralph Nader. In 1998, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia wrote Resolution S. 98 that expressed concerns about the Kyoto treaty, & in turn the Senate voted 95 to 0 for the resolution.
In recent years, Gore has remained busy traveling the world speaking & participating in events mainly aimed towards global warming awareness & prevention. His keynote presentation on global warming has received standing ovations, & he has presented it at least 1,000 times.
Gore is a vocal proponent of carbon neutrality, buying a carbon offset each time he travels by aircraft. Gore & his family drive hybrid vehicles.
Beginning in the fall of 2006, Al Gore & a team of climate change scientists & educators will train more than 1,000 individual volunteers to give a version of his presentation on the effects of & solutions for — global warming, to community groups throughout the United States. The presentation & training program are based on the message Gore has been giving for more than two decades, which inspired the documentary film & book, An Inconvenient Truth.
Interest in Al Gore's speeches reached such a point that a public lecture at University of Toronto on 21 February 2007, on the topic of global warming, led to a crash of the ticket sales website within minutes of opening. A few weeks later, he spoke at another event in the same city & , for the first time, made the argument that employers have a significant role to play in mobilizing their employees to take action on climate change.
Virgin Earth Challenge
On February 9, 2007, Al Gore & 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 which results
in the removal of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
Live Earth Concerts
Concerts
will be held on July 7, 2007 as part of the Save Our Selves — The Campaign
for a Climate in Crisis. Concerts will be held on all seven continents: Shanghai,
China, Sydney, Australia, Johannesburg, South Africa, London, England, Brazil,
Japan, United States, Antarctica.
Appearance on Futurama
In 2002 Al
Gore guest starred in an episode of Futurama titled " Crimes of the Hot ",
voicing the character of his own preserved head in a jar. In this episode his
head claimed credit for inventing the environment, writing the books Earth in
the Balance & the more popular Harry Potter & the Balance of Earth, &
becoming the first emperor of the moon. Al Gore later used a short clip from this
episode humorously explaining how global warming works in his presentations &
in An Inconvenient Truth. He said in jest that he thought it was better than the
traditional explanation of the theory.
Environment: An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore with other members of the crew during the acceptance speech for "An
Inconvenient Truth" on Academy Awards' nightAl Gore starred in the controversial
documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary
Feature. The Oscar was awarded to director Davis Guggenheim, who asked Gore to
join himself & other members of the crew on stage. During this time, Gore
gave a brief speech:
My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we
need to solve the climate crisis, it’s not a political issue, it’s a
moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception
of the will to act, that’s a renewable resource, let’s renew it.
The
film also won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Original Song for Melissa Etheridge's
"I Need to Wake Up".
The film was produced by Paramount Pictures, & released on May 24, 2006, & on DVD on 21 November 2006. It concerns global warming, an issue which Gore has followed since the 1970s. It is a warning regarding human contribution to climate change & the effects of not making changes in our behavior now. In the movie Al Gore states this is not a political issue but a moral issue. Before August it surpassed Bowling for Columbine as the third-highest grossing documentary film in U.S. history. Gore has also published a book of the same title which became a bestseller.
Coinciding with the release, Gore appeared on the May 13, 2006 episode of Saturday Night Live. In the opening, he plays himself from a parallel Earth in which he won the 2000 Presidential race. Gore then addresses the nation on the fact that: they stopped global warming & glaciers are now attacking America; gasoline costs 19¢ a gallon; George W. Bush is Baseball Commissioner; welfare & Social Security have been fixed & America now enjoys universal health care; Gore helped develop an anti-hurricane/tornado machine; & the federal surplus is down to eleven trillion dollars. Gore later appeared on Weekend Update & engaged in a debate on global warming with Amy Poehler.
Internet & technology
Gore bill & information superhighway
Up
until the early 1990s, Internet usage was limited as Campbell-Kelly & Aspray
note in their 1996 text, Computer: A History of the Information Machine:
During
the second half of the 1980s, the joys of 'surfing the net,' began to excite the
interest of people beyond the professional computer-using communities [...] However,
the existing computer networks were largely in government, higher education &
business. They were not a free good & were not open to hobbyists or private
firms that did not have access to a host computer. To fill this gap, a number
of firms such as CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, & America Online sprang up to
provide low cost network access [...] While these networks gave access to Internet
for e-mail (typically on a pay-per-message basis), they did not give the ordinary
citizen access to the full range of the Internet, or to the glories of gopherspace
or the World Wide Web. In a country whose Constitution enshrines freedom of information,
most of its citizens were effectively locked out of the library of the future.
The Internet was no longer a technical issue, but a political one. The problem
of giving ordinary Americans network access had exercised Senator Al Gore since
the late 1970s. In 1990 he was the author of the High Performance Computing Act,
which proposed the creation of a high-speed fiber optic network that would produce
enormous leverage for the information economy of the twenty-first century.
Gore
began to craft the High Performance Computing & Communication Act of 1991
(commonly referred to as The Gore Bill ) after hearing the 1988 report Toward
a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor
of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET.
He discussed the basics of this bill in an article for the highly regarded September
1991 issue of Scientific American entitled Scientific American presents the September
1991 Single Copy Issue: Communications, Computers, & Networks. His essay,
Infrastructure for the Global Village, commented upon the lack of network access
described above & argues: "Rather than holding back, the U.S. should
lead by building the information infrastructure, essential if all Americans are
to gain access to this transforming technology" [...] "high speed networks
must be built that tie together millions of computers, providing capabilities
that we cannot even imagine" . This was all part of the strong Al Gore internet
link.
The bill was passed on Dec. 9, 1991 & led to the NII or National Information Infrastructure which Gore referred to as the Information superhighway. President George H. W. Bush predicted that this bill would help "unlock the secrets of DNA," open up foreign markets to free trade, & a promise of cooperation between government, academia, & industry. Indeed, Leonard Kleinrock lists this bill as an important moment in Internet history:
A
second development occurred around this time, namely, then-Senator Al Gore, a
strong & knowledgeable proponent of the Internet, promoted legislation that
resulted in President George Bush signing the High Performance Computing &
Communication Act of 1991. This Act allocated $600 million for high performance
computing & for the creation of the National Research & Education Network
[13–14]. The NREN brought together industry, academia & government in
a joint effort to accelerate the development & deployment of gigabit/sec networking.
Campbell-Kelly & Aspray also note the impact of this bill in Computer:
A History of the Information Machine
In the early 1990s the Internet was
big news...In the fall of 1990 there were just 313,000 computers on the Internet;
by 1996, there were close to 10 million. The networking idea became politicized
during the 1992 Clinton-Gore election campaign, where the rhetoric of the 'information
highway' captured the public imagination. On taking office in 1993, the new administration
set in place a range of government initiatives for a National Information Infrastructure
aimed at ensuring that all American citizens ultimately gain access to the new
networks (1996:283).
As Vice-President, Gore continued to promote this vision
of the Information Superhighway. In February 1993, President Clinton & Vice
President Gore submitted a report, Technology for America's Economic Growth which
outlined the ways in which their administration planned further development of
what Gore referred to as the Information Superhighway by the year 2000. Gore further
developed these ideas in speeches that he made at The Superhighway Summit, on
1994-01-11 at Royce Hall, UCLA & for the International Telecommunications
Union on 1994-03-21. In addition, on 1994-01-13, Gore "became the first U.S.
vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international
computer network".
Perhaps one of the most important results of the bill was the development of the Mosaic (web browser) in 1993, the World Wide Web browser, which was developed under High-Performance Computing & Communications Initiative, a program created by the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic is generally credited by most scholars as beginning the Internet boom of the 1990s.
1999 CNN interview
As a result of the publication of three articles
in Wired News, Gore's 1999-03-09 interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
became the subject of heavy satire. During this interview, Gore stated:
During
my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the
internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives
that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth & environmental
protection, improvements in our educational system.
Media reports surrounding
this statement sometimes re-wrote it, stating that Gore claimed he "invented
the internet". Gore received support from members of the computer industry,
however, notably Internet pioneers Vint Cerf & Robert E. Kahn. Cerf &
Kahn issued the following statement on 2000-09-28 in response to the controversy:
[A]s
the two people who designed the basic architecture & the core protocols that
make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as
a Congressman, Senator & as Vice President. No other elected official, to
our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last
year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said:
"During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in
creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that
Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is
no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had
a significant & beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact
of the matter is that Gore was talking about & promoting the Internet long
before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
Gore, himself, poked fun at the controversy. In September 2000, as a guest
on the The Late Show with David Letterman, he read a list of the "Top Ten
Rejected Gore - Lieberman Campaign Slogans." Number nine on the list was:
"Remember, America, I gave you the Internet, & I can take it away!"
Aftermath: Apple, Google, & the Webbys
Despite the controversy,
Gore continued to be involved with the computer industry. He has been a member
of the board of directors of Apple Inc. since 2003 & serves as a Senior Advisor
to Google Inc. In 2005, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences
honored Gore at The Webby Awards with the Lifetime Achievement Award "for
three decades of contributions to the Internet". The Webby Awards, which
are widely hailed as the Oscars of the web, "wanted to set the record straight"
according to Tiffany Shlain, the awards' founder & chairwoman. She further
stated, "It's just one of those instances someone did amazing work for three
decades as Congressman, Senator & Vice President & it got spun around
into this political mess." Gore, during his acceptance speech (limited to
five words according to Webby Awards rules), joked: "Please don't recount
this vote".
Hurricane Katrina
In September 2005, Gore chartered
two aircraft to evacuate 270 evacuees from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina. He was highly critical of the government & federal response in the
days after the hurricane.
Controversies
Like most current & former
politicians, there has at times been controversy surrounding Gore & his actions.
These may range from his tenure as Vice President up through today.
Electoral
history
2000 United States Presidential Election (popular vote)
Al Gore
(D) 48.4%
George W. Bush (R) 47.9%
Ralph Nader (Green) 2.7%
Pat Buchanan
(Reform) 0.4%
Harry Browne (Libertarian) 0.4%
Howard Phillips (Constitution)
0.1%
John Hagelin (Natural Law) 0.1%
(After the Supreme Court ruling against
a Florida recount, Gore would lose the electoral vote.)
1996 United
States Presidential Election (Vice President's seat)
Al Gore (D) (inc.)
49.2%
Jack Kemp (R) 40.7%
Pat Choate 8.4%
Jo Jorgensen (Libertarian)
0.5%
Herbert Titus (Taxpayers) 0.2%
Michael Tompkins (Natural Law) 0.1%
1992 United States Presidential Election (Vice President's seat)
Al
Gore (D) 43%
Dan Quayle (R) (inc.) 37.4%
James Stockdale (I) 18.9%
Nancy
Lord (Libertarian) 0.3%
Cy Minett (Populist) 0.1%
1984 Tennessee
United States Senatorial Election
Al Gore (D) 60.7%
Victor Ashe (R)
33.8%
Ed McAteer (I) 5.3%
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