The global environmental crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

In this statement Gore frames climate change not as an abstract scientific debate but as an immediate, lived reality (“real as rain”), using regional idiom to make the crisis feel plainspoken and undeniable. The second clause shifts from diagnosis to moral urgency: the environmental crisis becomes a question of intergenerational responsibility, measured by what today’s adults bequeath to their children. The pairing of “degraded earth” with “diminished future” links ecological damage to social and economic prospects, implying that environmental stewardship is inseparable from human well-being. Overall, the quote exemplifies Gore’s rhetorical strategy of blending personal stakes with global scale to motivate action.