Mr Gore has been pushing them to do just that. The "former next president of the United States", as he calls himself, tried to get America to ratify the Kyoto protocol to control greenhouse-gas emissions while he was Bill Clinton's vice-president. Mr Clinton signed the protocol, but the Senate opposed the idea of America agreeing to a treaty that didn't include controls on developing-country emissions, so it was never ratified.
After an agonisingly tight finish in the 2000 election, which he lost by a few Floridian hanging chads, Mr Gore refused to disappear into the political wilderness. Instead, he prowled the country in the guise of an Old Testament prophet with audio-visual aids, warning of the dangers of climate change. His slick, entertaining presentation was eventually made into a film, "An Inconvenient Truth". That film, bizarrely for what was in effect a slide-show with lots of charts, did well at the box office and won two Oscars (although one was for a song).
Mr Gore has his detractors. His film is propaganda rather than documentary. A British judge this week ruled that it should not be shown to schoolchildren without a health warning, because there were several claims in it that were wrong: the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica are not, for instance, expected to melt "in the near future", but in millennia. Nevertheless, America is now generally expected to accept in some form the controls on emissions that it rejected when it turned down Kyoto, and Mr Gore has been instrumental in getting it there.
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9968899&top_story=1
