Climate missing from U.S. election - Gore

By John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa

OSLO (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore said on Monday the U.S. presidential election campaign had paid insufficient attention to the environment and climate change.

The former U.S. vice president, who lost a bid for the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 and has repeatedly said he has no plan to run again in 2008, said he would have pushed climate to the top of the agenda if he had been president.

"Some of the candidates have made speeches which are quite good and proposals that are quite responsible, but overall the issue has not achieved the kind of priority that I think it should have," Gore told Reuters.

"I don't blame the candidates for that, some of them have tried to push it higher on the agenda," he said before collecting the peace prize which he shared with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"That is just the very reason why I have put so much of my time into trying to change the way people think about this crisis in my country and around the world -- so that candidates will hear from citizens that they want this to be the top priority," Gore said in the Norwegian capital.

Asked what would have been different if he had been president, Gore said: "I like to think that I would have been able to push it (climate change) right to the top of the agenda.

"It takes time to talk to people in enough places to create a critical mass of opinion and urgency that will cause us to cross the tipping point beyond which a majority will demand that we solve this crisis," he said.

Gore has lectured widely on the environment and climate change since leaving office in 2001. Last year he starred in his own Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" to raise awareness and urge immediate action to halt global warming.