The Presidency of Al Gore, 2001-2009

(Note: Continually thinking about how disastrous the last seven years have been, I did some imagining and research on what the world would be like if Al Gore had become president in 2001. Such a process is really about how important it is to elect the right president. I asked friends and acquaintances for their ideas, I read books by and about Gore, and I watched again his September 2000 interview with Oprah Winfrey, where I learned about his favorite book and movie and his art teacher. Here are some of my findings.)

The Presidency of Al Gore, 2001-2009

On January 20, 2001, Al Gore, the candidate who won the most votes, becomes the 43rd president of the United States.

President Gore follows up on the many urgent warnings from the intelligence agencies that Osama Bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States. The 9/11 planners are caught, and their plots are aborted.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban warns that it will destroy the two giant 1,500-year-old statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Much of the world sees these serene figures as symbols of wisdom beyond time, but they offend conservative Muslims. Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke talks with the Pakistani foreign minister, who reminds him that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and suggests that if aid to the poor there is increased, the Buddhas will be spared. Gore calls the American Buddhist actor Richard Gere, who immediately raises $50 million for the Afghani poor, and the Gore administration promises $5 billion in direct aid over the next five years. The Taliban agrees to preserve the statues.

Gore's favorite film, Local Hero, the Scots eco-comedy, becomes a best-selling DVD. The film is about how ancient values of subsistence, closeness to nature, and community defeat the rapacious forces of the oil industry. People like quoting the old Scot who puts the kibosh on the oilmen: "The business left, but the beach is still here."

Republicans are squawking that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a threat to the safety of the country, that he has weapons of mass destruction. Gore asks the United Nations to send its weapons inspectors back into Iraq, and after six months of searching, they find none. Saddam is in what Eliot Weinberger calls "the 'autumn of the patriarch' mode: holed up in his palaces writing his trashy novels, and oblivious to the details of government." Gore brokers a deal in which Saddam's novels are translated into English and published and he agrees to slowly loosen up some of the restrictions on the Kurds and Shias and bring them into the government.

In 1998, as vice president, Gore proposed a NASA satellite, Triana, to provide, from a distance of 930,000 miles, a continuous view of the sunlit side of the earth. Triana would measure global warming by measuring how much sunlight is reflected and emitted from the earth and would monitor weather systems. Triana is built and launched in February 2003. In late 2004, it sends back images of the beginnings of a great tsunami that might have killed hundreds of thousands if it had gone undetected in its early stages. But Triana's continual data feed allows people to be warned to flee to higher ground, and only a few dozen perish.

The president's favorite book, Stendahl's The Red and the Black, becomes a bestseller. People like quoting the book's young hero, Julien Sorel: "So there, this is what these rich people are like. First they humiliate you, then they think they can make it up to you by monkey business!"

Recognizing that nothing good can come from the continuing Israeli-Palestinian standoff, Gore sends Holbrooke and Vice President Joe Lieberman to broker a peace. In May the two sides sign a peace accord, in which Israel agrees to go back to the 1967 boundaries, the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist, and both sides renounce violence. The Republic of Palestine is founded in 2002.

President Gore has a nightmare: He becomes president on January 20, 2001, but the next day he is incapacitated, and Lieberman becomes president. In the spirit of the close election, Lieberman appoints George W. Bush as vice president on January 22. The next day Lieberman is incapacitated, and Bush becomes president and appoints Dick Cheney his vice president. The Bush-Cheney presidency starts January 23, not January 20. Immediately Bush begins abrogating treaties of long standing that kept the world at peace. Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001. Bush enacts draconian laws that make America a police state. People constantly refer to "9/14" as the day that changed everything. President Gore wakes up in his bed in the White House in a cold sweat, the dream disappearing from his conscious mind but the numbers 9 and 14 puzzling and haunting him at odd moments for the rest of his days.

As vice president, Gore signed the Kyoto Accord on Climate Change in 1998, but there were not enough votes to ratify it in the Congress, and there still are not. President Gore, however, is able to implement most elements of the treaty by executive order. He begins a process of education about global warming and publishes a book on the subject. He sponsors twenty-four hours of concerts with rock and pop stars, Live Earth, on every continent, and broadcast on television, radio, and the Web to raise awareness about climate change and global warming. A third of the planet's population watches and hears the concerts and has a pretty good time in the process. Soon every nation has ratified Kyoto, and the climate crisis begins to ebb. The temperatures of the oceans stop rising, and thus the severity of hurricanes stops increasing...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-macafee/the-presidency-of-al-gore_b_101200.html

Has said he will have no other office than the presidency.

:cry:

"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been'." - John Greenleaf Whittier

and couldn't go on.

The days since Dec 12, 2000 have been an unimaginable horror. I'm not sure our country can recover from the damage that has been done.

...we wake up from the nightmare of seeming reality of the last eight years.

A conservative congress will stand in the way of his every move, being openly hostile to every good thing he tries to do.

By 2004 he is seen as a frustrated, do little president. George is voted in and the Iraq war just starts a little later.

I love the vision and the will of Al Gore. If he had been president "An inconvenient truth" would not have been made. He almost certainly would not have the nobel prize. And George Bush would still be in the white house.

But I guess we'll never know for sure.

With, of course, the MSM hounding Gore and pouncing on every possible misinterpretation of his words, the constant belittling of conservation, and investigations into every cabinet member's lives to find dirt.

Topped off with Lieberman announcing that he would be leaving the Democratic Party for the Republicans in 2004 to campaign for W....

Somedays it's almost too much...

That's what Gore did and look what he was able to do with it.

Something I guess I have to learn and learn again.

Speculative history is always fun but the fact is that there are so many variables that predicting virtually anything is usually pointless.

California's history might be quite different with a Gore administration in place.


In 2001 after taking office, Al Gore recognizes that there is a coming crisis with fossil fuels with the growing energy crisis in California in 2000 and knows that something needs to be done. He updates the budget to alternative energy research (solar, wind, etc.) and doubles it (Bush downgraded it to less than half). Congress facilitates more of this redoubling efforts when they see the energy crisis start to cause blackouts in California and call on FERC to investigate what Enron and other energy companies have been doing with the energy trading that Enron seems to have "overprofiting" from. FERC starts to find evidence of manipulation of the energy trades with the timely "shutting off" of energy generation plants, that contributed to the skyrocketing price rises in energy. Governor Gray Davis appeals to Al Gore to put more pressure on the FERC to step in and help out. Al Gore fires the existing FERC chairman (a free marketer left over from the Clinton administration, and puts a newer one in place that is more in favor of revamping the power grid nationally to add energy from other resources, and actually encourage decentralized sources of energy that had been ignored when lobbyists from energy companies had encouraged otherwise in the past). The FERC stepped in and helped the Independent System Operator in California freeze prices at the wholesale level, as the retail arms of companies like PG&E were separate entities preparing to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy and soak the state for more dollars while the wholesale subsidiary arm of this company was maximizing profits on the excessively high profits the wholesale market was making.

Al Gore instructed the FERC to issue a price freeze while the energy trading was investigated and plans for stepping up other sources of energy generation were embarked upon to make the market more competitive again. In addition to looking at making sure that existing plants worked optimally and weren't "breaking down" that provided the spikes in utility rates, Gore worked with Governor Gray Davis to update the State's solar energy laws to not only provide credit to those generating solar energy up to their amount of consumption, but also compensate them the daily wholesale rates for energy to those individuals that generated more energy back onto the grid than they pulled down. Solar Energy companies with the added influx of research cash, as well as laws that encouraged builders and home owners to really ramp up the solar energy generating capacity of each house, really started to invest heavily and started building plants to ramp up production of solar tiles, and within months, the costs of solar energy generation started to drop heavily as the economies of scale increased. Gray Davis also signed a new law that would allow both renters and owners of a building to benefit financially from these energy credits, which incented landlords to also do a massive upgrade of rental properties with solar energy generation as well.

Through the first few months of the energy crisis in 2001, a lot of these efforts didn't help as much, but as the newer solar powered homes got put in play, the rate caps on wholesale energy trading started to drop below the rate caps and the debts for retail companies of energy started to drop a lot, even though they were paying back some of what they were getting to solar energy providers, the added energy generation from solar on the grid made up for these payouts.

With the early investigations of Enron energy trading practices and their "cozy" relationship with Arthur Anderson, Al Gore sought to push congress to update the deregulatory laws passed by Newt Gingrich in the 90's which Bill Clinton tried to veto unsuccessfully, that allowed situations like Arthur Anderson serving as both an accounting and a consulting firm for Enron. The House pushed back on this, but in the Senate with a Democratic majority since Jeffords shifted to independent status, a bill was passed there that helped bring back some more regulatory laws back. This was very much amended in the House to the point of being inadequate. It is thought that this clear patronization of lobbyist elements helping energy companies at the public's expense helped bring the House more in Democratic hands in 2002.

Gray Davis, having helped get his state budget more under control (without having to go to very expensive re-negotiations of agreements with utilities). The increased benefits received by home owners profiting the updating of their housing to solar panels helped him increase his popularity.

In April 2003, Gray Davis sent a letter to the Gore administration, also signed by the California congressional delegation, that requested federal dollars be spent on cleaning up the bark beetle problem in federal parklands which were contributing to the very hazardous potential fire conditions in these areas. Al Gore instructs FEMA to look into this, and increased budget is asked from congress to address this real problem. Congress replies back that they need to put in place laws that would allow companies to "thin the forest" more in those areas that would also prevent fire problems. Gore fires back that he's not going to let timber companies to go in and grab what they want and not address the real problem, which is to clear the forest of these bark beetle infested trees. A compromise is reached and some degree of regulated logging of these trees is allowed while also removing the bark beetle infestation, but ensuring that no old growth trees are logged, and that replanting procedures are followed to not affect habitat. The bark beetle infestation is helped a lot in the coming months, and when the fires started in the Fall, they were very threatening, but the lack of bark beetle infested timber allow firefighters to control its spread and it is contained.

Gray Davis's actions here, and working with Gore to help overcome the huge problems with the energy crisis revive his popularity some, and help him stave off the recall election created by Issa and his Republican cronies.

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A couple of other events that might have changed might be that Microsoft might have been broken up into smaller companies or something like that, as most assuredly, I don't think that their appeal would have gone through under a Gore administration (especially given that Al Gore now sits on Apple's board!). It was just too convenient that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly overturned their anti-trust ruling back in 2002 on the Friday before the elections of that year in November, and only a month or so after she got appointed to the FISA court by the Bush administration. Don't think that part of history would have been the same under Gore.

Dianne Feinstein also might be history too, if Davis stayed in office instead of being pushed out by recall. Then the Democrats might have had more incentive to investigate her husband's company benefitting from her committee's activities, which could have lead to her ouster and being replaced with a newer appointment by Davis. Either that, or she might have been a lot better "behaved" under a Gore administration and justice system. She certainly wouldn't have had to play the same game of "exposing" Gore firing Attorneys like she did with Bush.