The following is a speech I did to a small group of people that was received quite well so I'm posting it here
To preface this speech I realise it is probably necessary to give a quick introduction to Al Gore as a person, because anyone who’s ear I haven’t already talked off about him is likely unfamiliar with him. So, here is a quick summary I shamelessly ripped from my own webpage.
Al served the USA as vice president to president Bill Clinton, a self-described "Conservative Christian Democrat".
The Clinton-Gore administration is known for reducing government bloat- they had a 123 BILLION dollar budget surplus in 1999, which is the largest recorded surplus in the USA, even adjusting for inflation. An example from Vice President Gore himself when he appeared on Letterman: they had found that the ashtrays used in government buildings were required to be of such quality that they had to break into less than a certain amount of pieces if broken! Reducing wasteful practices like this on a large scale is said to be how they cut so much fat while preserving muscle, so to speak. Al ran for President of the United States in 2000 with Joe Lieberman as his running mate– his platform ran on topics such as medicare, social security, and climate preservation– he even did a fairly decent job taking credit for the Clinton-Gore administration's victories while dodging the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, in which the president was revealed to be having an affair with a Whitehouse intern. Al won the popular vote by 543,895 votes, but lost in the electoral college, at the time making him the only person besides Grover Cleveland to have this happen (Though Hillary Clinton soon followed). It was a topic of immense debate at the time, many calling for a recount, but Gore conceded to maintain humility. Currently, Gore is predominantly a climate activist.
A common misconception about Al is that he “defected” to climate research after he lost (ahem, AHEM, WON) election 2000 because he was an attention seeking man child who couldn't bear irrelevance. This is not true.
As a young man, Al worked on his family’s farm in Carthage, Tennessee and thus learned about all those things you need to know so you don't have a big hole where your land should be; topsoil erosion, cattle care, pesticides, the like. Gore himself said his interest in the environment actually began as a teenager when his mother was reading a magazine about pesticides and their impact on the environment.
But, contrary to what some would let you believe, it was FAR from a passive interest. Al Gore not only made the climate an issue in his time as vice president, but at only 28 years of age in 1976, he held some of the first congressional hearings on climate change and co-sponsored hearings on toxic waste and global warming. He became close with David Keeling, the FIRST MAN to measure co2 levels, and this helped to fuel his passion towards the scientific case for climate activism.
Progressing, in 1992 as a senator he released an ENTIRE BOOK called “earth in the balance” which, by the way, i've listened to the abridged audiobook about a million times and im halfway thru the actual book (go check it out it’s great). Earth in the Balance was the first book released by a sitting senator to make it to the bestsellers list since JOHN F. KENNEDY’S “Profiles in Courage”.
He went on to try and get the kyoto protocol passed as vice president and regularly made it a topic of his speeches. I mean, when I hear myself list this all off i think the accusation that he's purely a grifter is a little absurd; Al wasn’t getting called “Ozone Man” by George H.W Bush in 1992 just for people in 2012 to say he just started grifting to cope with his recent divorce.
Now, I will be real about this, Al has said and will probably again voice predictions about the climate that are wrong; I had to google this to confirm what he was actually wrong about because my only sources were the confusingly recent hate comments on his posts, but al gore has a harmful habit of overshooting climate crisis predictions.
To name the most erroneous of the few:
- He made a model that basically said half of Florida was going to sink
- He said it would straight up stop snowing on mount Kilimanjaro by 2020
-And, he’s taken a liking to the theory linking hurricanes and global warming, though some scientists say the link is tenuous.
HOWEVER, To say that a few mistakes in the 50 odd years he’s been campaigning for, when he isn’t and doesn't claim to be a climate expert, merely someone voicing the concerns of them, is not an unforgivable crime and I don't believe it does away with the good that he’s done. On the climate, al gore has released 6 books, two documentaries, and he still gets around doing speeches every now and then. If it were a grift, he at least deserves credit for investing early, when people still called you a tree-hugging hippie for saying fast cars and hairspray aren't worth setting the ocean on fire for, and even more credit for continuing it well past retirement age.
