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A look back at ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ 20 years later | Al Gore’s famous documentary has mostly stood the test of time.
(yaleclimateconnections.org)
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Imagine if instead of all the money spent on the Iraq war had instead been invested in green infrastructure here in the US. Doubly so if 9/11 had been prevented and Afghanistan hadn't happened either.
If 9/11 didn't happen, there's no Patriot Act, no Homeland Security Act, no ICE, etc.
I can't even fathom how different this country might have been without those defining events.
During the last two years of Clinton's presidency, we had an actual fucking budget surplus. We could have been debt-free as a nation now, instead of sitting on nearly $40 trillion owed.
Imagine if the 2008 recession hadn't occurred...
That's what I mean. Virtually everything would be different.
People say Clinton's win solidified the corpo-facist bipartisan agenda. I'm not sure. I thinks Gore's loss did. I think we would have seen a lot fewer mergers and less consolidation, in addition to what you mentioned.
Al Gore being President would not have stopped 9/11... that was a ball set in motion long before the 2000 election.
The response to 9/11 might have been different since the Clinton / Gore administration had tended to deal with international terror attacks on the US as criminal matters rather than acts of war... but up until then none of the terror attacks had been anywhere near as successful at 9/11, so it is entirely possible that Gore would have had a similar response as Bush in Afghanistan. And the Patriot Act and Homeland Security came from Congress, which would have been the same makeup no matter who the President was.
What would have been different is we very likely would not have gone to war with Iraq, and we possibly could have ended up breaking ties with Saudi Arabia, if not going to war with them, over 9/11. The loss of Saudi Arabia as an 'ally' would have been a huge benefit for green infrastructure in the US.
I could be wrong since it's mostly a vague memory at this point, but I recall reading at some point that Bush brushed off some reports in the handoff from the Clinton admin about Islamic terrorism.
So maybe 9/11 would have happened anyways and we just would have seen a different response, or maybe Gore could have acted on those reports and caught the perpetrators before 3000+ people were killed.
Bin Laden was #1 on the FBI's most wanted list for years. Everyone knew he was a threat. And 9/11 wasn't the first time that al qaeda trained militants attacked the World Trade Center... it was bombed during the Clinton / Gore administration. Years later they attacked US Embassies, and instead of sending troops in to try to get Bin Laden, instead they launched missiles at an al qaeda training camp. Then all qaeda attacked the USS Cole, and again the US government under both Clinton / Gore and Bush did little to nothing as a response. Clinton/ Gore had 8 years to go after all qaeda and did very little... Bush had 8 months.
The issue wasn't that the US government (under either administration) didn't take it seriously, the issue was that the FBI, NSA and CIA weren't communicating the information they had... and that's what the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to help resolve. The mission of DHS was good... the (lack of) guardrails, was not.
Its also possible they would indeed stop 9/11 but that doesnt stop them from trying again later and maybe they blow up a sports stadium full of people instead.
Stopping one thing by no means means stopping future things.
Edit: just to be very clear here, stopping 9/11 short of taking out Bin Laden and the leadership would have just resulted in them planning something else amd trying again. They weren't ever going to stop trying. We might have had intel about 9/11 but that doesnt mean we'd have Intel on the next thing.
the clinton administration was well aware of al kaida as a threat and desperately tried during transition for the bush adminstration to see that. In addition they understood the role of the presidency in connecting the dots between different agencies intelligence reports. I like its very very likely they would have identified and stopped it before they got to the planes.