Global warming was already a significant theme of Gore's speeches in 1987 and 1988. Perry backed crusading Gore in '88

Texas Gov. Rick Perry may have forgotten a thing or two about the Al Gore presidential campaign he helped lead in 1988.

In an interview with an Iowa radio station on Monday, the Republican presidential contender explained his role as the Gore campaign’s Texas chairman by saying that “this was Al Gore before he invented the Internet and got to be Mr. Global Warming.”


But in fact, global warming was already a significant theme for Gore in 1987 and 1988 — long before his activism led to several books, a Nobel Prize and a part in an Academy Award-winning film. It was also well before the right gave him the "Mr. Ozone" nickname and talk radio heaped endless mockery on the future vice president.

Gore, then a young Tennessee senator trying to break out in a crowded Democratic field, mentioned the warming planet as one of his priorities for his presidential campaign in April 1987, according to news coverage at the time.

“He laid out a broad list of national objectives, from combating AIDS and Alzheimer's disease to curbing the ‘greenhouse effect’ — the threat to the Earth's atmosphere from the burning of oil, gas and coal,” The Los Angeles Times reported in covering Gore’s announcement. In May 1987, according to The Washington Post, his stump speeches included a call for the nation to “confront the emerging problems of the greenhouse effect and the threat to our ozone.”

Later that summer, Gore joined Republican Sen. John Chafee in calling for urgent action on climate change and the threat of coastal flooding.

Such was his reputation for green wonkery that, in a January 1988 profile in the Christian Science Monitor, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund said of Gore: ''I think it would be safe to say that he goes to bed at night worrying about things like stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming.''

So was all this unknown to Perry, who at the time was a Democrat trying to put Gore in the White House?

No, Perry spokesman Mark Miner said Monday. They just disagreed.

“The governor has always been a conservative and didn't agree with Al Gore on every issue, global warming being one of them,” Miner said in an email to POLITICO.

Perry has, of course, broken with Gore before. In a December 2009 speech to builders in Dallas, Perry said a lot had changed in the years since he worked on Gore’s campaign: “I certainly got religion. I think he’s gone to hell.”

In a 2007 speech to Californian Republicans, Perry said: "I've heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I'm starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide."

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 6:27 p.m. on August 15, 2011.