Former US vice president Al Gore has ruled out a bid for the White House in the 2008 elections and will carry on his fight against global climate change. "I have no intention to run for president," Gore said in an interview conducted in Los Angeles and broadcast Thursday by the BBC.
"I can't imagine in any circumstance to run for office again," said the former Democratic vice president under then-president Bill Clinton.
Gore was defeated in the 2000 presidential race by Republican President George W. Bush.
He has since been crisscrossing the globe with his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," a blistering indictment of pollution that warns against ecological catastrophe by climate change.
Gore announced Thursday in Los Angeles a massive 24-hour global concert to save the planet from global warming, patterned after the awareness-raising Live 8 concert about world poverty.
Called Live Earth, shows are planned on July 7 in Shanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, and London, and yet-undecided sites in Brazil, Japan, the United States, and possibly other countries.
The concert marks the latest foray by the ex-vice president into cultural politics. His "An Inconvenient Truth" has been shown worldwide and is nominated for an Oscar at this year's Academy Awards.
Gore was the US negotiator for the international Kyoto Protocol that set global goals on emission of so-called greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
The protocol was agreed in 1997 and took effect in February 2005, but Bush refused to ratify it, citing its high economic cost and the fact that China and India, the world's largest producers of greenhouse gases after the United States were, as developing nations, not bound by it.
Greenhouse gases allow sunlight through Earth's atmosphere, but line glass in a greenhouse, traps heat inside, and is already blamed for shrinking polar ice caps and may cause violent weather changes.
