In 2010 the UT Board of Trustees approved the recommendation of the College of Arts and Sciences and Knoxville campus nomination committee to award Albert Arnold Gore Jr. an honorary doctor of Laws and Humane Letters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Spring College of Arts and Sciences commencement.
While serving as vice president, Gore established the Nancy Gore Hunger Chair of Excellence in Environmental Studies at UT. The formal announcement was made by Gore on campus May 2, 1994. He partially funded the chair with proceeds ($50,000) from his book Earth in the Balance and assisted the university in raising the remainder of the $450,000 required to obtain matching funds of $500,000 from the state.
Gore was an elected official for 24 years. He represented Tennessee as a congressman from 1977 to 1985 and as a senator from 1985 to 1993. He served as vice president during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and was the nominee of his party in 2000. In the 2000 presidential election, he won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College to Republican George W. Bush because of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in favor of Bush over a controversial vote recount in Florida.
After joining the US House of Representatives, Gore held the “first congressional hearings on the climate change,” and cosponsored hearings on toxic waste and global warming. He continued to speak on the topic throughout the 1980s. In 1990 Senator Gore presided over a three-day conference with legislators from over 42 countries that sought to create a Global Marshall Plan, “under which industrial nations would help less developed countries grow economically while still protecting the environment.” In the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. He has founded several nonprofit groups related to environmental concerns, among them the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Gore is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore-cite_note-228.) He starred in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2007 and wrote the book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, which won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2009.