Today is the birthday of congressman, senator and 45th vice president of the United States, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., in 1948. He is the son of Albert Gore, Sr., former senator from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, the first woman to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School.
Gore has a widely varied history. Though he and his father were vocal Vietnam War critics, and though he could have pulled strings to stay out, he went anyway. Gore said that he did not want to be responsible for someone with fewer options than he to go in his place.
Gore was widely criticized during his presidential run for allegedly saying that he invented the Internet. He never said that. The Bush campaign said he said that.
Gore was one of the "Atari Democrats" who were given this name due to their passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the greenhouse effect. On March 19, 1979, he became the first member of Congress to appear on C-SPAN. During this time, Gore co-chaired the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future with Newt Gingrich.He has been described as having been a genuine nerd, with a geek reputation running back to his days in the House. Before computers were comprehensible, let alone sexy, the poker-faced Gore struggled to explain artificial intelligence and fiber-optic networks to sleepy colleagues. Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn noted that,
"...as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."
As a Senator, Gore began to craft the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science, Leonard Kleinrock, one of the central creators of the ARPANET (the ARPANET, first deployed by Kleinrock and others in 1969, is the predecessor of the Internet). The bill was passed on December 9, 1991, and led to the National Information Infrastructure, or Internet.
Gore was one of the earliest victims of the win-at-all-costs Republican party we have to live with today. Had Jeb Bush not illegally disenfranchises thousands of black voters in Florida, that election wouldn't have even been close.
Gore was way ahead of the curve on climate change. In the late 1990s, He strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. He was opposed by the Senate, which passed unanimously (95–0) the Byrd–Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States." Robert Byrd represented West Virginia and never saw a coal mine he didn't love.
In 2006, Gore produced the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, in which he managed to make dry data interesting and, indeed, horrifying.The director of the film, Davis Guggenheim, stated that after the release of the film, "Everywhere I go with him, they treat him like a rock star."
The Academy Award Winning film put climate change firmly on the political stage, spawning a generation of conspiracy theories. In 2007, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group dedicated to providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change, its natural, political and economic impacts and risks, and possible response options.
Had we listened to him in the late 90's, addressing climate change would have been a great deal easier. We've goofed around to the point at which it is essentially impossible.
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