Oh, nonsense. Gore would have been equally bad as an intellectual or a teacher. "Earth in the Balance" is a severe embarrassment. He is full of flaky ideas, but his thinking goes about 2" deep.
The New Yorker article points out that Gore drives a 2004 Cadillac and Tipper drives (if you can believe it) a 1965 Mustang. In his book "Earth in the Balance" he decries the evil of the internal combustion engine. The guy is a joke.