NORWAY: December 11, 2007


OSLO - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore said on Monday the US presidential election campaign had paid insufficient attention to the environment and climate change.


The former US vice president, who lost a bid for the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 and has repeatedly said he has no plan to run again in 2008, said he would have pushed climate to the top of the agenda if he had been president.

"Some of the candidates have made speeches which are quite good and proposals that are quite responsible, but overall the issue has not achieved the kind of priority that I think it should have," Gore told Reuters.

"I don't blame the candidates for that, some of them have tried to push it higher on the agenda," he said before collecting the peace prize which he shared with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"That is just the very reason why I have put so much of my time into trying to change the way people think about this crisis in my country and around the world -- so that candidates will hear from citizens that they want this to be the top priority," Gore said in the Norwegian capital.

Asked what would have been different if he had been president, Gore said: "I like to think that I would have been able to push it (climate change) right to the top of the agenda.

"It takes time to talk to people in enough places to create a critical mass of opinion and urgency that will cause us to cross the tipping point beyond which a majority will demand that we solve this crisis," he said.

Gore has lectured widely on the environment and climate change since leaving office in 2001. Last year he starred in his own Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" to raise awareness and urge immediate action to halt global warming.

The announcement in October that Gore and the IPCC had won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize briefly sparked speculation that the prize would catapult Gore into frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.


NO PLAN TO RUN

But Gore repeated at a news conference on Sunday that he has no plan to run for president next year, though he left open the door to a political comeback in the future.

"I have no plans to be a candidate," Gore said. "As I have also said, I have not completely ruled out the possibility of at some point in the future revisiting whether I would ever want to enter the political process again.

"I don't expect to do that. I doubt very seriously that will ever happen but I see no need to remove it entirely as a possibility in my life."

Gore told the news conference he had made no decision on whether to endorse any of the candidates.

He told Reuters that putting a price on carbon emissions would be the most important step that could be taken in the battle against climate change.

"There is one solution that by itself would be the most important change, to put a price on CO2," he said. (Editing by Janet Lawrence)


Story by John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE