Al Gore, the joke goes, was the guy who used to be the next president. What the U.S. missed from Gore’s inability to sway a few more electoral college voters and the majority of the Supreme Court back in 2000, it gained in a fuller understanding of Sustainability...that’s with a capital S. But what's less known is the story of the guy who wrote the check that made Gore’s Nobel Prize possible, an act that forever cemented the concepts Climate Change and Sustainability in the minds of global leaders. 
I first saw what would become Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," as a live lecture on the campus of Stanford University in 1998 or 1999; I can’t remember which. That was back in the dot-com daze, when everything was possible and money was no object and I wore all black. Gore was good. Very good. It got lots of us Left Coasters thinking big thoughts about starting a movement. But most of us put that option on the back burner because the Internet and its infinite possibilities had grabbed our hearts, minds and wallets.
Fast-forward five years. It was 2005 that eBay’s employee No. 2 and first CEO Jeffrey Skoll saw the lecture too, and read the Veep's book http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthebook/. When Skoll stepped aside to make way for eBay’s current CEO, Meg Whitman, who soon took eBay public, Skoll made a bundle on his eBay stock. A very big bundle. With that bundle, he started the Skoll Foundation, which famously funds a class of "social entrepreneurs" such as our friends at Ceres and SustainAbility. With another chunk of his bundle Skoll started Participant Productions to fund media projects that furthered his social-entrepreneurship agenda. Skoll was so inspired by Gore’s message that he wrote the check to Davis Guggenheim and Gore that sped the documentary film into production.
Little did Skoll know that his check would create a media frenzy that would result in Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize. The check transformed Gore from a Bob Dole-like Presidential wannabe to a globe-trotting media star. He hosted "Saturday Night Live." He keynoted the World Economic Forum in Davos. His cable media empire finally gained critical mass. He was nominated for an Academy Award in late 2006, and won the Oscar for Documentary Film in February 2007. He does TV spots with Cameron Diaz promoting a Sustainability contest. And now there’s a Draft Gore movement to get him to run for President again (which he won't do...being a Nobel Prize-winning-media star is a much better job).
Today, Jeff Skoll runs his foundation and continues to fund film and video projects via Participant Productions. If you subscribe to Vanity Fair or surf the movie star sites, you’ll occasionally see celebrity photos of Skoll walking with actress Meg Ryan or some other member of the star set. He’s a bona fide member of the "in" crowd. And over the next 40 or 50 years, Skoll will undoubtedly use the rest of his money and credibility to create more momentum behind his movement. But fast-forward 50 years to the day when Skoll and many of the rest of us are dead and gone. I’ll bet that by that time, adding all of Skoll’s other achievements together will not equal the magnitude of the results of that one check he wrote back in 2005. Congratulations Jeff Skoll. That Nobel Peace Prize is at least a little bit yours too.