After year of disasters, Gore still has hope for climate
The world is on cusp of revolution, he says
Millions of lives in Florida, Puerto Rico, Texas and elsewhere were upended by hurricanes, and tens of thousands of Californians lost their homes or businesses in wildfires in 2017.
Last year, President Trump mocked climate science on Twitter and rejected an international climate change agreement, and his administration began undoing dozens of regulations meant to slow the rise in global temperatures. Despite all that, Al Gore is optimistic. In an interview with USA TODAY at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which screened his new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, this week, Gore pointed to what he called signs of progress.
India plans to sell only electric vehicles by 2030 and generate staggering amounts of solar and wind power over the next five years. China is launching a national carbon trading program to limit pollution. Norway’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund — the world’s biggest investment fund — plans to sell its $37 billion worth of shares in oil and gas companies.
Driven by rapidly falling prices of solar and wind power and by forwardlooking governments in countries such as India and China, the world has finally reached a technological tipping point in the battle against climate change, Gore said. The world is at the beginning of “a sustainability revolution that has the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution but the speed of the digital revolution,” the former vice president said.
“We saw it with the marriage equality movement. We saw it earlier with the civil rights movement. All these movements have bumped along very slowly with an agonizingly slow pace, and then all of a sudden there’s an inflection, and people say, ‘Oh, I get it,’ ” Gore said. “We’re at that point now with efforts to solve the climate crisis.”
Federal scientists reported Monday that 2017 marked America’s third-hottest year on record and contained 16 separate weather and climate disasters that each caused losses exceeding $1 billion, including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and the California wildfires. The damage from those disasters totaled a record-breaking $306 billion. Though scientists don’t attribute all those disasters to human-caused climate change, they said human influence probably played a role in worsening many of them.
Gore compared watching the nightly news to “a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.”
“People are connecting the dots on their own,” he said.
Gore’s new film says hardly anything about Trump, even though its release came six months after he took office. Instead, Gore and the filmmakers focus on reasons for hope: the growth of solar and wind power and the Paris climate agreement signed by nearly every country in 2015.
Gore said the Trump presidency has been “less consequential than I feared it would be.” He had been concerned other countries would follow Trump’s lead in exiting the Paris deal.
“The entire rest of the world stood up and said, ‘We’re still in the Paris agreement.’ Some countries doubled down on it. California and quite a few other states said, ‘We’re still in.’ Hundreds of cities, thousands of businesses, and the U.S. is now going to exceed its commitments under the Paris agreement regardless of Trump.”
Still, Gore said he’s painfully aware that more must be done to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Earth is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution, when people started pumping large amounts of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. The Paris agreement set a goal of limiting the warming to no more than 3.6 degrees, but scientists fear that’s slipping out of reach. Staying under that limit was based on countries committing to more ambitious targets every few years, which may be more difficult without the United States at the table.
“I don’t think it’s ever too late to recapture its position of leadership, but a great deal of damage has been done to the reputation of the U.S. in the rest of the world,” Gore said. “And many countries are now beginning to plan as if they can’t rely on U.S. leadership.
“I don’t think it’s too late. But I think we need a new president,” he said.
Gore said one election isn’t enough to turn the tide on climate change. He harshly criticized the “cottage industry of climate denial” and said the United States is “unique in all the nations of the world in having this persistent climate denial movement that is financed by the large carbon polluters.”