Al Gore is a guest speaker at the annual Scottish low carbon energy conference, returning to Edinburgh after its launch last year. The Conference has strong support from the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise, who are keen to make it a leading international forum for emerging renewable energy and other low carbon markets.
Launching the conference last year, First Minister Alex Salmond said that the aim of the conference was to bring together alternative energy technologies like tidal and wind energies with the financial interests to find out how the industry will move forward.
Here's First Minister Alex Salmond's comments on the event this year:
"Scotland is a world leader in the fast-growing low carbon sectors. Our huge clean energy resources and established industrial expertise mean we are well-placed to seize the considerable opportunities presented by the growth of low carbon industries. I am delighted that former Vice-President Gore will be attending this year's conference and I look forward to welcoming him to Scotland.
"The conference will bring together government, finance, utilities and developers to engage directly on the opportunities and challenges presented by the global shift to low carbon economies. Since last September, inward investment decisions by world-leading wind turbine manufacturers Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Doosan, and by global power giants ABB and Alstom into our wave energy technologies, have underlined Scotland's position as a global centre of excellence for offshore renewables.
"Scotland's '2020 vision' to generate the equivalent of 100 per cent of our annual electricity consumption from renewables, alongside our ambitions to reduce energy demand and improve efficiency, will underpin the delivery of our world-leading targets to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions. The world faces both a moral obligation to act against growing climate chaos and a clear economic imperative to avoid much greater future costs - a truth that is being increasingly recognised across the world."
Al Gore served as Vice President of the United States with President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2006 for his work to increase knowledge about and promote actions to counteract man-made climate change. The documentary about his work, entitled 'An Inconvenient Truth', won an Oscar in 2007.
Mr Gore is a founder and current chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection, the co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management, and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, heading that firm's climate change solutions group.