Gore: I Have No Plans To Run

Former Vice President Al Gore says winning the Nobel Peace Prize has not pushed him into entering the 2008 presidential race.

"I don't have plans to be a candidate again, so I don't really see it in that context at all," Gore told Norwegian state broadcaster NRK in an interview broadcast Wednesday. "I'm involved in a different kind of campaign. It's a global campaign. It's a campaign to change the way people think about the climate crisis."

NRK said it interviewed Gore in Nashville, Tenn.

At a press conference last Friday in Palo Alto, California, Gore sidestepped the issue of a U.S. presidential run, saying then that he wanted to "get back to business" on "a planetary emergency."

However, before winning the Nobel Prize he had said repeatedly that he has no plans to run for office in 2008.

Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists. The scientific panel has explained the dry details of global warming in thousands of pages of footnoted reports every six years or so since 1990.

Gore told NRK that it was a "great honor" to win the peace prize.

"For me personally it means the chance to be more effective in trying to deliver this message about the climate crisis and the urgency of solving the climate crisis," he said.

On Tuesday, a Gallup Poll found that there was no spike in support for Gore to run for office.

Asked if they would like to see Gore run for president in 2008, people said no by a margin of 54 percent to 41 percent, according to the Gallup Poll, about the same as in March, when people opposed his running by 57 percent to 38 percent.

Even among Democrats there was no visible surge of interest in Gore. In the new survey, 48 percent of them said they would like him to run and 43 percent said they would not. In March, Democrats were in favor of his entering the race by 54 percent to 41 percent -- statistically the same as the new poll.