Prizes
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Nominee: Al Gore
Age: 58
Group: Former Vice President of the United States, the Virgin Earth Challenge, Current TV, Generation Investment Management, Apple Inc., Google
Contact information: For interviews and to inquire about speaker availability, please contact Richard Morrison in the media relations department at 202.331.2273, or rmorrison@cei.org.
E-Mail: rmorrison@cei.org
Type of nomination: Conservation
Description of nominee: Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician, teacher, businessman, and environmentalist who was the 45th Vice President of the United States in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. Previously, he had served in the United States House of Representatives (1977-85) and the United States Senate (1985-93) for Tennessee. Gore was the Democratic nominee for President in the 2000 election. He won a plurality of the popular vote, with over half a million more votes than the Republican candidate George W. Bush, but was defeated in the Electoral College by a vote of 271 to 266.
Gore currently is president of the American television channel Current TV, chairman of Generation Investment Management, a director on the board of Apple Inc., and an unofficial adviser to Google's senior management. He lectures widely on the topic of global warming, which he calls "the climate crisis".[1] Gore has contracted to write a new book, The Assault on Reason, to be published May 22, 2007. While Gore has stated that he does not intend to be a Presidential candidate again, he has left open the possibility being a candidate in the future, and Gore is frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
While a Representative, Gore co-sponsored hearings on toxic waste in 1978-79, and hearings on global warming in the 1980s. While a senator working on his book Earth in the Balance, Gore had traveled around the world on numerous fact-finding missions. During Gore's tenure as Vice President, he was a proponent for environmental protection. On Earth Day 1994, Gore launched the worldwide GLOBE program, an innovative hands-on, school-based education and science activity that made extensive use of the Internet to increase student awareness of their environment and 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, and/or were not implemented to the satisfaction of critics such as Ralph Nader.[53] In 1998, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia wrote Resolution S. 98 that expressed concerns about the Kyoto treaty, and in turn the Senate voted 95 to 0 for the resolution.
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 1000 times.
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.
Beginning in the fall of 2006, Al Gore and a team of renowned climate change scientists and educators will train more than 1,000 individual volunteers to give a version of his presentation on the effects of and solutions for - global warming, to community groups throughout the U.S. The presentation and training program are based on the message Gore has been giving for more than two decades, which inspired the documentary film and book, An Inconvenient Truth.
Al Gore will be giving a public lecture at University of Toronto in 21 February 2007 on the topic of global warming. Tickets went on sale (via box office and online) at 11am. The University of Toronto's sales website crashed, however, within 3 minutes. This was due to the fact that 23,000 hits were registered.
Al Gore starred in the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth produced by Paramount Pictures, released on May 24, 2006, and 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 and 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.[58] Gore has also published a book of the same title which became a bestseller.
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 come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming.
Concerts will be held on 07 July 2007 as part of the Save Our Selves The Campaign for a Climate in Crisis. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Al Gore announced Thursday that concerts will be held [...] to focus worldwide attention on the threat of climate change, with a powerhouse lineup of acts from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Snoop Dogg to Bon Jovi." The concerts will be held in "Shanghai, China; Johannesburg, South Africa; Sydney, Australia; London, England and cities to be announced in Japan, Brazil and the United States."
An Inconvenient Truth has been nominated for the 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. If the film wins, the award will go to Davis Guggenheim, the film's director. According to a February 1, 2007 article in The Washington Post, Al Gore Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, two members of Norway's Storting claim to have nominated Al Gore for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to draw the world's attention to the dangers of global warming, along with Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, although this is neither confirmed nor denied by the Nobel Committee.
Al gore who has done more than anyone to wake up the United States as to the reality of global warming with his lectures and film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Ellen Evert Hopman
(Information taken in part from the Wikipedia article, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore)
Nominator(s): : Ellen Evert Hopman - Druid Priestess, Order of Whiteoak