WTOL.com, Toledo's News Leader, News 11 | Gore: Next president will shift climate

Gore: Next president will shift climate

Posted:

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore said Monday he believes the next U.S. president will shift the country's course on climate change and engage in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

"The new president, whichever party wins the election, is likely to have to change the position on this climate crisis," Gore told The Associated Press in an interview before the Nobel Prize ceremony. "I do believe the U.S., soon, is to have a more constructive role."

Gore said it was not too late for the administration of President George W. Bush to join efforts to draft a new global treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

"I have urged President Bush and his administration to be part of the world community's effort to solve this crisis," Gore said. "I hope they will change their position."

The Bush administration opposed the current Kyoto treaty on climate change, saying it would hurt the U.S. economy. It also objects to the fact that high-polluting developing nations, such as China and India, are not required to reduce emissions.

Gore shares the prestigious peace prize with the U.N. climate panel for their efforts to raise awareness about global warming. He said he did not see the Nobel as vindication for his failed presidential bid in 2000, when he lost the election to Bush.

"Fate does not always give us the choice we'd like to make," he said in a suite at the Grand Hotel in downtown Oslo. "I am under no illusion that there is a position in the world with as much potential for influencing the future as president of the United States, but that was not to be."

Instead, Gore said he was "grateful I found a way to play a useful role in helping to form the world's resolve to solve this crisis."

Gore's presentation "An Inconvenient Truth" and the Oscar-winning documentary by the same name have riveted audiences around the world. In March in Oslo, that included the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel awards committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, seven months before announcing that Gore would share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

"I think the Nobel committee is recognizing that this cause is worthy of greater attention, and I have already had the happy experience of hearing from some people (in the United States) who were skeptics who have said they are going to take a second look at this matter because of the respect in which they hold the Nobel committee," Gore told the AP.

The 59-year-old politician turned climate campaigner repeated that he had "no plans" to run for the U.S. presidency again.

"I don't expect to ever be a candidate for public office again, but I don't see any reason to completely exclude the possibility of reconsidering that at some point in the future. I don't expect to, but I don't rule it out," he said again Monday.

Posted by LS

CBS and Associated Press contributed to this report