The world owes much to former US Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to bring the issue of climate change to the public arena. His Oscar-wining film, An Inconvenient Truth, is just part of his decades-long campaign to alert the world to this “planetary emergency.”
The film brought him much criticism and disapproval from many political and business leaders but it accomplished what he set out to do – which was to spark the discussion of the issue and perhaps from there, work on the solution.
Al Gore had been involved in environmental activism from a number of decades. Even as a freshman congressman, he held the first congressional hearings on climate change and continued to pursue this topic throughout the 1980s.
Gore was met with much opposition and criticism especially in the 90s when he pushed for the passage of the Kyoto protocol, which called for countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He was strongly opposed by the US senate by a vote of 95-0.