Al Gore thought Trump ‘might come to his senses’ on climate change. Nope.
FORMER vice president Al Gore said he tried for months to persuade President Donald Trump to take climate change seriously — and thought there was a possibility he could come around, until Trump announced he would pull the United States out of the Paris agreement in June.
“I thought, actually, there was a chance he might come to his senses,” Gore told late-night television host and comedian Bill Maher. “But I was wrong.”
Gore made an appearance on Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” to promote his second documentary about the threat of climate change, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” His PowerPoint-heavy fi rst fi lm, “An Inconvenient Truth,” became a surprise hit when it came out in 2006 and is one of the highest- grossing documentaries in history.
The two movies have bookended Gore’s efforts over the past decade to educating the public about climate change while the Trump administration fi ghts a slew of environmental regulations.
Gore told Maher that, yes, he had visited Trump Tower last December at the invitation of Ivanka Trump to talk to the then-President- elect Donald Trump about climate change — and that the “conversation continued after he went into the White House.” Though his efforts would prove to be fruitless, Gore said he was heartened by at least one development that followed Trump withdrawing from the Paris agreement.
“When he made his speech pulling out of Paris, I really was concerned that some other countries might use that as an excuse to pull out themselves,” Gore told Maher. “But the very next day, the entire rest of the world redoubled their commitment to the Paris agreement, as if to say, ‘ We’ll show you, Mr. Trump.’” — WPBloomberg