An Inconvenient Truth

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Less than a year after Earth in the Balance was published, I was elected vice president — ultimately serving for eight years. I had the opportunity, as a member of the Clinton-Gore administration, to pursue an ambitious agenda of new policies addressing the climate crisis.

At that time I discovered, firsthand, how fiercely Congress would resist the changes we were urging them to make, and I watched with growing dismay as the opposition got much, much worse after the takeover of Congress in 1994 by the Republican party and its newly aggressive conservative leaders.

I organized and held countless events to spread public awareness about the climate crisis, and to build more public support for congressional action. I also learned numerous lessons about the significant changes in recent decades in the nature and quality of America’s “conversation of democracy.” Specifically, that entertainment values have transformed what we used to call news, and individuals with independent voices are routinely shut out of the public discourse.

In 1997 I helped achieve a breakthrough at the negotiations in Kyoto, Japan, where the world drafted a groundbreaking treaty whose goal is to control global warming pollution. But then I came home and faced an uphill battle to gain support for the treaty in the U.S. Senate.

In 2000 I ran for president. It was a long and hard-fought campaign that was ended by a 5–4 decision in the Supreme Court to halt the counting of votes in the key state of Florida. This was a hard blow.

I then watched George W. Bush get sworn in as president. In his very first week in office, President Bush reversed a campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions — a pledge that had helped persuade many voters that he was genuinely concerned about matters relating to the environment.

Soon after the election, it became clear that the Bush-Cheney administration was determined to block any policies designed to help limit global warming pollution. They launched an all-out effort to roll back, weaken, and — wherever possible — completely eliminate existing laws and regulations. Indeed, they even abandoned Bush’s pre-election rhetoric about global warming, announcing that, in the president’s opinion, global warming wasn’t a problem at all.

As the new administration was getting underway, I had to begin making decisions about what I would do in my own life. After all, I was now out of a job. This certainly wasn’t an easy time, but it did offer me the chance to make a fresh start — to step back and think about where I should direct my energies.

At first, I thought I might run for president again, but over the last several years I have discovered that there are other ways to serve, and that I am really enjoying them.

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