Climate Leadership

For more than 40 years, former Vice President Al Gore has been at the forefront of the movement to solve the global climate crisis.

A longtime public servant, Vice President Gore prioritized the climate crisis and its solutions throughout his career as a Congressman, Senator, and as Vice President. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Gore organized the first hearing on man-made global warming in 1981. In the Senate, Gore held numerous hearings on the climate crisis and hosted an international conference to discuss his proposal for a Global Marshall Plan to focus on “a unified global response to the worldwide environmental crisis.” As Vice President, Gore continued his focus on solving the Climate Crisis, encouraged the development of low-carbon technologies through the Climate Change Technology Initiative and the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles to replace the internal combustion engine. In an effort to improve environmental education globally and encourage action, Vice President Gore established the GLOBE program, which continues to promote environmental awareness among children in tens of thousands of schools around the world. In 1998, Vice President Gore challenged NASA to build a satellite that could survey our planet from the LaGrangian 1 point and help humanity understand the climate crisis from a new perspective. Following a lengthy delay imposed in early 2001 by the incoming Bush-Cheney Administration, DSCOVR was successfully launched on February 11, 2015. Since leaving office, Vice President Gore has continued and intensified his efforts to urge action on climate.

On the international stage, Vice President Gore has played a crucial role in promoting global action on the climate crisis. In 1992, Vice President Gore led the U.S. Senate delegation to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—otherwise known as the Rio “Earth Summit”—that established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As Vice President, Gore helped to broker the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first major international agreement on the climate crisis. He has addressed numerous international summits including the Bali Climate Change Conference (COP 13) in 2007, the United Nations Climate Summit in September 2014, the Lima Climate Change Conference (COP 20) in December 2014 and the Paris Climate Change Conference (COP21) in 2015, the Glasgow Climate Change Conference (COP26), and the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference (COP27). To draw additional awareness to the climate crisis on the world stage, in 2007, Vice President Gore co-founded Live Earth, a groundbreaking series of concerts that brought together 150 world-famous acts on 7 continents. In total, the event reached over 2 billion people across 30 countries. In 2007, Vice President Gore was the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for, “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Today, Vice President Gore continues his work to help lead the global movement to solve the climate crisis. As chairman of the Climate Reality Project—the organization he founded in 2005—Vice President Gore has trained tens of thousands of committed activists to discuss the reality of the climate crisis and its solutions. As co-founder of Climate TRACE, Vice President Gore is working with scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, and industry analysts to create the first and only robust, independent inventory of global greenhouse gas emissions in every nation of the world, and their specific point sources, in order to better enable climate action.

A bestselling author, Vice President Gore has published five books on the climate crisis and its solutions, Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth, The Assault on Reason, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis and The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change