We’ll never know for sure, but this seems like revisionist history and motivated reasoning. Gore and his advisors supported regime change in Iraq when he was in office and intelligence failures didn’t suddenly start in early 2001, nor were they restricted to the United States.[0]

It’s possible that the tone around climate change would have been different under a Gore administration, but the entire composition of Congress would also have looked different after the mid-terms in response to a Democratic president making sweeping changes to the economy (as it was republicans already controlled the Senate for half of Bush’s time in office, and the house for three quarters). The fiscal conservatism of 90s republicans may have stayed intact instead of accepting large deficits as they did under Bush.

The feature and bug of the US system of democracy is that radical change is hard to do and disagreements can’t be steamrolled over. Sometimes the right person can have an enormous effect on the course of history (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), but it’s unlikely Gore was one of those people.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-al-gore-wo...