Al Gore - Man on a Mission

Nobel Prizes are always hotly debated, more so the peace prizes. This time the Nobel committee made quite a radical departure by recognising the environmantal crusaders.

Al Gore's Nobel citation said,"His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change.He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."

Al Gore, has risen like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes of failed,close run presidential bid which saw him losing out to George Bush by a whisker. (The world would definitely have been a different place had he come into the White House.). In the span of the last decade, he went from being the vice-president to the presumptive Democrat nominee for president to winning the popular vote for president only to lose in the electoral college after an intervention by the supreme court made his 537-vote loss in Florida official.Gore’s decision to give up the fight after the supreme court decision left some of his more die-hard supporters bitter, and he, by and large, retreated from public view for several years.The once political incumbent chose to quit the political arena to espouse a cause he was keen on-The environment.
Shedding his image as a brainy but dull policy wonk, Gore oversaw the Live Earth concert in July, which elevated him to Bono-like coolness in some quarters. “If you had told me 10 years ago that people were going to be appealing to me for tickets to a hot rock concert through my parents, I would have fallen over,” his daughter Karenna Gore Schiff told Vanity Fair magazine.

Today. on the centerstage again, he is in a vantage position to make a positive influence on the policy authors.

Footnote: British bookmakers once put 100-to-1 odds on Gore winning an Oscar, becoming a Nobel laureate and becoming president. He has now accomplished two of the three, and on Friday bookies slashed the odds to 8/1 from 10/1.

(This article is a commentary on an archived news article...some content is quoted from there)