Gore: Nobel is Just a Start in Climate Fight

Oct 13, 03:39 AM

Current Headlines: By Thomas Fitzgerald, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Oct. 13--Former Vice President Al Gore's early devotion to environmental issues, particularly climate change, for years inspired derision -- "Ozone Man," President George H.W. Bush called him during the 1992 presidential campaign.

Sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his efforts to spread the alarm about global warming represented vindication for Gore's activism -- and a reversal of his personal fortunes. It came nearly seven years after Gore won the popular vote for president but lost in the Electoral College when the Supreme Court halted a Florida recount.

"This is just the beginning," Gore said yesterday in Palo Alto, Calif. "Now is the time to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face."

Gore, subject of an Oscar-winning documentary about the problem, An Inconvenient Truth, was awarded the peace prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. network of scientists. The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited both for efforts to "build up and disseminate" knowledge about climate change.

The committee called Gore "probably the single individual who has done the most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

"We face a true planetary emergency," Gore said, pledging to donate his half of the $1.5 million prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group. "The climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

The award renewed interest in Gore's political future as several groups seeking to draft him into the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential nomination used the publicity to press their case. Gore did not address the possibility yesterday. In the past, he has said he was not interested in running for president, without ruling it out.

The award could also be seen as a rebuke of President Bush's administration, which initially expressed skepticism about global-warming science but has since acknowledged the problem. The administration continues to oppose the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires developed countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. The White House says the protocol, which Gore helped to negotiate when he was vice president, would put an unfair strain on the U.S. economy.

Gore is the second Democratic critic of Bush to win the prize in the last decade. Former President Jimmy Carter won in 2002, at a time when he was speaking against the impending Iraq war.

Nobel Committee members said they were not intending to slap at Bush but to acknowledge that climate change affects the security of the world.

Advisers and former aides to Gore said it was highly unlikely that the honor would inspire him to change his mind about running for president.

"He's doing nothing to put a campaign in place, and we don't expect it," Roy Neel, who was Gore's chief of staff in the White House, said in an interview. "If anything, this will only intensify his principal commitment to work on this issue of climate change."

Kathleen McGinty, secretary of Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection and a longtime friend and adviser to Gore, said she spoke with him yesterday and did not think the Nobel would be a catalyst for him to run for president.

"It's not about expressions of political support," McGinty said. "It's about the opportunity for him to further the issue."

She remembered that Gore talked fervently about global warming in the late 1980s when she began working on his Senate staff.

"The Nobel Committee got it right," said McGinty, an environmental adviser to Gore during his last term in the Senate and chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality in the Clinton administration. "If we don't get our arms around the issue, we'll have conflict over the world's increasingly stressed resources."

Associates of Gore's say he does not really want to run for president but does not mind the attention the speculation brings to his cause. If he did run, they say, he would be cheapened by electoral politics.

"The second you become a candidate, people look at you through a different prism," said Chris Lehane, a former aide and the spokesman for Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. "In many ways he's transcended partisan politics," and running would diminish his "moral authority" on climate change, Lehane said.

Even if Gore is interested, there are practical hurdles to getting a campaign off the ground with less than three months to go before the first round of nominating contests. Recent polls have shown large majorities of Democrats satisfied with the choices they have, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has climbed to a commanding lead.

"I think he would be a great president, but I don't think it's happening," said Center City lawyer Ken Jarin, who was a major fund-raiser for Gore in 2000. "It doesn't look like we're headed to a deadlocked convention or a situation where the front-runner falters."

Beyond politics, Lehane said he savored the award for the "affirmation" it conveyed to Gore as a person.

"This is a guy who won the presidential election in terms of votes but wasn't sworn in to office -- yet he didn't put himself into a bunker or curl into the fetal position. . . . He dedicated himself to a public-policy passion he's had his whole life."

No one was giving Gore insulting nicknames yesterday -- in public, at any rate -- but conservative critics consider him an alarmist and doubt the severity of the climate problem.

"Al Gore should probably get a prize for most travel in a private jet, but not the peace prize," said Myron Ebell, director of global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a market-oriented think tank. "The energy-rationing policies he espouses would perpetuate the poverty and human misery associated with political instability and conflict."

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For more on Gore's sharing the Nobel Peace Prize, plus links to video and an article on other winners, go to http://go.philly.com/nobels

Contact staff writer Thomas Fitzgerald at 215-854-2718 or tfitzgerald@phillynews.com.

Inquirer staff writers Amy Worden and Sandy Bauers contributed

to this article, which also includes information from Inquirer wire services.

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