Al Gore would be a lot more popular if he was trying to do something like cleaning up the garbage patch instead of trying to push a policy that is an acknowledged failure in places where it has already been tried.
Except there is no money to be made in cleaning up the garbage patch.
Few if any people are against sane pollution controls. Preferring folks not dump dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls, etc into the water is perfectly understandable. Hell, if folks were aware of what coal plants crank out in hard rads, uranium and thorium, they might be a bit more willing to embrace nuclear power plants. Nothing wrong with requiring people to dispose of their waste responsibly and not needlessly wasting our resources.
But let's be honest. The folks that actually care about the environment, do not have significant ulterior motives and possess any type of scientific/educated background are very, very rare. Folks that advocate mass usage of solar panels are unaware of the very limited power they can produce and completely unaware of the manufacturing byproducts involved. Folks that rant against modern agriculture are unaware that they'd sentence at least 1.7 billion people to death if successful. etc, etc. Very few "true" environmentalists want to actually protect the environment without killing billions of humans or reducing us to the Stone Ages.
A very significant number of environmentalists are interested making a buck via scams, misinformation or flatout gunpoint. Another significant number of environmentalists are just flat out anti-capitalists, anti-modern Luddites, etc.
Al Gore. Whether or not he is sincere is entirely secondary to the fact that he wants to enforce his views and forcibly take money from a large number of people at literal gunpoint. It would be one thing if his views were backed with decades of hard science and provable, repeatable and heavily scrutinized results with clear published procedures and data. This is not an unreasonable demand. Virtually every branch of science demands such. Why should climate change be any different?
He may or may not be correct. That is not the point. The point is he wishes to transfer large sums of money from other people to himself at gunpoint. That should require very, very good reason. Which he flat out doesn't currently have. I don't care whether you believe he is right or wrong. No one yet has enough conclusive proof one way or the other and unfortunately with a cross between politics and often incompetent data collection, we are unlikely to GET conclusive proof because few folks on BOTH side seem to actually want it.
If you really want to save the environment, go get an engineering degree and build real technology that is more efficient. Go build a better chemical process that is more efficient, more profitable and reduces waste. Reducing CO2 at gunpoint would be roughly one thousands of a single percent as efficient as making it actually profitable to reduce CO2 through greater efficiency or superior technology. By actually profitable, I mean in a real economic way, not through government subsidies, threats of violence or other coercion that are the preferred tools of the most environmentalists.