With his Oscar, Gore – along with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – can add a Nobel Peace Prize to his portfolio after the Nobel committee announced his award October 12. There is reason to believe this prize strikes a real PR coup for his climate change message and a PR blow to the designated climate change deniers. Add to that Gore’s recent appearance at the United Nations summit on climate change in Bali - where he characterized the Bush administration as the main obstacle to progress in the fight against global warming and it's evident that Gore is still at centre stage, even if not officially – as yet - a political one.

In June of 2006 after the release of his film, Gore and The Climate Project aimed to educate and train 1,000 people in the U.S. to go back into their various communities presenting his Inconvenient Truth Power Point package on the threat of global warming. The response was immediate and overwhelming and eventually included 21 Canadians.

Montrealers Desirée McGraw and Shelley Kath are two of Gore’s soldiers pounding the pavement for the cause, bringing their hometown spin on how climate change affects Quebecers and Canadians, churches, schools, universities and private businesses.

Montreal-West resident McGraw, at 37, is a veteran of global issues having started when she was 16, taking the message of nuclear disarmament across Canada with SAGE (Students Against Global Extermination). Active in the federal Liberal Party, she is the author of a 70-page blueprint policy paper on the environment. She's esctatic about Gore’s Nobel award. “This is vindication for those of us who believe climate change is a serious problem. I’m honoured to be part of the process of getting the message out.”

Desiree is no stranger to public speaking. “When I was 16 and touring the country with SAGE, we were talking to senior Canadian officials and army personnel much older than us,” she said. After the birth of her son Jack, now almost two, she decided to get back to her grass roots touring days, inspired by Al Gore’s movie and message

Project Climate has been running the three-day training session to meet its goal of 1,000 presenters, a goal met in less than one year. McGraw took her training; travelling and staying in Nashville last April at her own expense, as do all involved. There were about 150 others in on that particular session. “Not everybody there is an environmentalist,” said McGraw. “You get all kinds of people, some with little environmental experience. The idea when we go back to our communities is to seek people out who are dubious about global warming and educate them.”

McGraw has had more than enough bookings to take her into next spring and hopes this fall to reach more people in the business and industrial sector, where skepticism about climate change is more of a factor. “I’m not into beating people over the head with my point of view,” she hastened to add. “We want to motivate people to take action and we want them to come away with a sense of hope – that they can make a difference.”

Shelley Kath is a transplanted New Yorker with a fondness for Montreal. She met and married her husband here and can now call herself Quebecoise after 14 years here. Once the legislative director for the New York Sierra Club, a U.S.-based environmental group, the McGill-educated lawyer was the first Canadian trained by Gore’s Climate Project in December of 2006. She now is a mentor to and erstwhile co-ordinator for Canada’s 20 Gore ambassadors. Like McGraw, Kath sees the issues of global warming as a chance to get back to her Sierra Club activist days. “When I saw An Inconvenient Truth, it made me feel that I had to get back to basics,” she explained. Kath thinks that the time has come for people to take action. “The whole debate about whether or not global warming is some kind of scientific conspiracy just takes time away from the more important work.”

Both McGraw and Kath agree that people need direction on what they can do in their own lives to make a difference. “There are many things people can do in their own homes and lives,” said Kath. “The writing is on the wall. We need to put pressure on industry and governments. Things like improvements in public transportation and the need for reduced exhaust emissions; these are things people can lobby to change.”