Al Gore & The Climate Reality Project Welcome 1500 New Climate Leaders

Climate Reality Leadership Corps Now Includes 6000 Trained Activists From 50 States and 100 Countries

Al Gore Announces Third Annual 24 Hours of Reality Global Broadcast and First-Ever Climate Segment at Social Good Summit

CHICAGO, July 31, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- At a keynote presentation earlier this morning, former Vice President Al Gore officially welcomed more than 1500 new members to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. As part of his day-long session with attendees, Mr. Gore, the Founder and Chairman of The Climate Reality Project, delivered an updated slideshow presentation first made popular by the award-winning An Inconvenient Truth.   

Volunteers from all 50 states and more than 70 countries attended the Climate Reality Project's twenty-third training program, and participants included teachers and students, academics, lawyers, physicians and nurses, entertainers, homemakers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, public servants, and more. Following the training, Climate Leaders emerge from the program as energized and skilled communicators with the knowledge, tools, and drive to educate diverse communities on the impacts of climate change and to demand action now. Since the program's inception, Climate Leaders have reached millions of people worldwide through their presentations in their communities. In 2013, Climate Reality CEO Maggie L. Fox challenged Climate Leaders to undertake more than one thousand Acts of Leadership, including presentations in their communities, public hearings, and media outreach to a collective 1.3 million people worldwide.  

This is the second Climate Reality Leadership Corps event in 2013, following the organization's largest-ever international training program in Istanbul in late June 2013.

Mr. Gore also made several announcements during his presentation:

Third Annual 24 Hours of Reality
"Today, we're proud to announce the third annual 24 Hours of Reality, which will take place this year in Los Angeles on October 22."

"Every year, we travel around the world to explore the reality of the climate crisis and tell just some of the countless stories of how it's transforming lives and how people are joining together to do something about it. The theme of this year's 24 Hours of Reality is the exorbitantly high cost of carbon pollution that we've all been paying for way too long now."

"The cost of carbon pollution is something we've all been living with and paying for years while the fossil fuel industry just keeps making record profits. It's time now to make the polluters pay for the damage they cause in super storms, wildfires, and rising seas, among other costs of carbon pollution, and put a price on carbon."

In 2012, 24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report broke the world record for viewers of a live online event, with more than 17 million online views, and won ten prestigious Telly Awards for excellence in online content. The broadcast also generated more than 165 million impressions on social media. In 2013, we plan to smash this record. For more information, please visit www.climatereality.com.

Social Good Summit
Mr. Gore also announced that The Climate Reality Project will serve as a co-host of the first-ever climate segment at this year's Social Good Summit in New York City on September 23, and that he will provide the keynote address at the first-ever Climate Segment at the Summit.

"I want you to join with Climate Reality and me to come together with one shared goal: to unlock the potential of new media and technology to make our planet a better place and translate that potential into action. We will also be unveiling an exciting new campaign called What I Love, and are excited to debut this in front of some of the most influential personalities in social media."

Mr. Gore will be joined by some of the world's leading bloggers and social media influencers, as well as Kandeh Yumkella, head of the United Nations' Sustainable Energy For All initiative; Steve Howard, Chief Sustainability Officer at IKEA; Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable, the world's largest blog; Helen Clark, head of the United Nations Development Program; and dozens of the world's biggest names on climate change. For more information, please visit www.mashable.com/sgs.

About Climate Reality
The Climate Reality Project is one of the world's leading organizations dedicated to mobilizing social consensus around climate change. With a global movement more than 5 million strong and a grassroots network of trained Climate Leaders, we are spreading the truth and unleashing the cultural momentum to solve the climate crisis. Former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore is the founder and Chairman of The Climate Reality Project. For more information, visit www.climaterealityproject.org or follow us on Twitter at @ClimateReality.

SOURCE Climate Reality Project