Gore has gone as far as anyone in the system

Joel Kovel wrote:
Gore has gone as far as anyone in the system to challenge its ecological implications. He is the first—and still the only—instance of a kind of ecocentrism breaking into the consciousness of an official in capital’s stronghold. For whatever reasons—he himself emphasizes the shock of his sister’s death from lung cancer induced by the consumption of tobacco, a crop from which his family had grown wealthy—Gore became sensitized to the large-scale environmental effects of the economic system. He began to see these in ecological terms, and to focus on the overarching menace of global warming.