The Climate Reality Project
The Climate Reality Project is a non-profit organization founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore following the release of his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, with the aim of increasing public awareness and catalyzing action on what it describes as the climate crisis through education and advocacy.[1] Its core activities center on recruiting, training, and mobilizing individuals via the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, a program that equips participants with tools to deliver presentations on climate science, policy solutions, and mobilization strategies modeled after Gore's slideshow format.[2] By the end of 2024, the organization had trained over 51,000 leaders spanning 193 countries, forming a global network focused on promoting transitions to renewable energy and reducing fossil fuel dependence.[3] The group's mission emphasizes making "urgent action a necessity across every sector of society," including advocacy for policies that accelerate clean energy adoption and counter what it terms climate misinformation.[2] Notable initiatives include annual training summits, campaigns like "24 Hours of Reality," and partnerships to amplify grassroots efforts, which have reportedly enabled leaders to conduct thousands of presentations reaching millions.[3] While praised by supporters for building a worldwide activist base, the organization has drawn criticism for its strong alignment with alarmist narratives on climate impacts, with independent assessments noting a left-leaning bias in its advocacy that occasionally intersects with fact-checking disputes over predictive claims tied to Gore's broader work.[4] Funded primarily through donations and grants, it operates branches in multiple countries and maintains a focus on diverse recruitment to broaden its influence.[5]Origins and Evolution
Founding and Early Initiatives
The Climate Reality Project originated in 2006, founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore shortly after the May release of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which highlighted data on rising global temperatures, sea levels, and extreme weather events attributed to human activities.[1] This initiative built on Gore's prior advocacy, including the establishment of the Alliance for Climate Protection earlier that year to advocate for policy measures reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[6] The organization's early efforts centered on The Climate Project, launched in June 2006, which trained volunteers to replicate Gore's slideshow presentation to disseminate information on the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change.[7] Initial activities emphasized public education and grassroots mobilization within the United States, aiming to build support for emissions reductions through widespread awareness campaigns.[8] By late 2006, Gore had begun conducting training sessions for presenters, focusing on key empirical indicators such as CO2 concentration increases from pre-industrial levels of approximately 280 ppm to over 380 ppm by that period, correlated with industrial expansion.[9] These sessions sought to equip participants with data-driven narratives to counter skepticism and urge immediate policy action, including carbon pricing and renewable energy shifts.[10] The approach relied on leveraging media visibility from the documentary, which grossed over $50 million globally, to amplify the message without initial large-scale international expansion. Early initiatives avoided direct political endorsements, prioritizing non-partisan civic engagement to foster a sense of urgency around causal links between fossil fuel combustion and observed climatic shifts, such as glacier retreat and species migration patterns documented in IPCC assessments referenced by Gore.[2] This phase laid the groundwork for scaling presenter networks, with hundreds trained by 2007, though measurable impacts on public opinion or policy remained debated amid varying source interpretations of climate data reliability.[11]