Nobel laureate Gore sees hope in "people power"

By John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa

OSLO (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore said on Sunday he was optimistic that a growing "people-power" movement would push the world's leaders to take action to stop global warming.

The former U.S. vice president likened the campaign to the ban-the-bomb movement of past decades, and urged leaders at a U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to issue a mandate for a strong treaty to curb greenhouse gases.

Gore, who shared the 2007 peace prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for raising awareness and advancing climate science, will receive the prize in Oslo on Monday with the IPCC's chairman Rajendra Pachauri. The prize was announced in October.

"I have one reason for being optimistic, and that is that I see throughout my own country, the United States of America, and throughout the world the rising of the world's first people-power movement on a global basis," he said.

Gore pointed to an international grassroots nuclear-freeze movement which helped push U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign arms controls deals in the late 1980s, and said the climate campaign was even broader.

Gore and Pachauri will travel from Oslo to Bali where governments are meeting to try to launch negotiations towards an environmental treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012.

"It is my great hope that the meeting in Bali will result in a strong mandate empowering the world to move forward quickly to a meaningful treaty," Gore said.