The new urgency of climate change Al Gore
Chris Anderson: Al, welcome.
So look, just six months ago –
it seems a lifetime ago,
but it really was just six months ago –
climate seemed to be on the lips
of every thinking person on the planet.
Recent events seem to have swept it
all away from our attention.
How worried are you about that?
Al Gore: Well, first of all Chris,
thank you so much for inviting me
to have this conversation.
People are reacting differently
to the climate crisis
in the midst of these
other great challenges
that have taken over our awareness,
appropriately.
One reason is something
that you mentioned.
People get the fact
that when scientists are warning us
in ever more dire terms
and setting their hair
on fire, so to speak,
it’s best to listen
to what they’re saying,
and I think that lesson
has begun to sink in in a new way.
Another similarity, by the way,
is that the climate crisis,
like the COVID-19 pandemic,
has revealed in a new way
the shocking injustices
and inequalities and disparities
that affect communities of color
and low-income communities.
There are differences.
The climate crisis has effects
that are not measured in years,
as the pandemic is,
but consequences that are measured
in centuries and even longer.
And the other difference is that
instead of depressing economic activity
to deal with the climate crisis,
as nations around the world
have had to do with COVID-19,
we have the opportunity to create
tens of millions of new jobs.
That sounds like a political phrasing,
but it’s literally true.
For the last five years,
the fastest-growing job in the US
has been solar installer.
The second-fastest has been
wind turbine technician.
And the “Oxford Review of Economics,”
just a few weeks ago,
pointed the way to
a very jobs-rich recovery
if we emphasize renewable energy
and sustainability technology.
So I think we are crossing
a tipping point,
and you need only look
at the recovery plans
that are being presented
in nations around the world
to see that they’re very much
focused on a green recovery.
CA: I mean, one obvious impact
of the pandemic
is that it’s brought the world’s economy
to a shuddering halt,
thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I mean, how big an effect has that been,
and is it unambiguously good news?
AG: Well, it’s a little bit
of an illusion, Chris,
and you need only look back
to the Great Recession in 2008 and ‘09,
when there was a one percent
decline in emissions,
but then in 2010,
they came roaring back during the recovery
with a four percent increase.
The latest estimates are that emissions
will go down by at least five percent
during this induced coma,
as the economist Paul Krugman
perceptively described it,
but whether it goes back the way it did
after the Great Recession
is in part up to us,
and if these green recovery plans
are actually implemented,
and I know many countries
are determined to implement them,
then we need not repeat that pattern.
After all, this whole process is occurring
during a period when
the cost of renewable energy
and electric vehicles, batteries
and a range of other
sustainability approaches
are continuing to fall in price,
and they’re becoming
much more competitive.
Just a quick reference
to how fast this is:
five years ago, electricity
from solar and wind
was cheaper than electricity
from fossil fuels
in only one percent of the world.
This year, it’s cheaper
in two-thirds of the world,
and five years from now,
it will be cheaper in virtually
100 percent of the world.
EVs will be cost-competitive
within two years,
and then will continue falling in price.
And so there are changes underway
that could interrupt the pattern
we saw after the Great Recession.
CA: The reason those pricing differentials
happen in different parts of the world
is obviously because there’s different
amounts of sunshine and wind there
and different building costs and so forth.
AG: Well, yes, and government policies
also account for a lot.
The world is continuing
to subsidize fossil fuels
at a ridiculous amount,
more so in many developing countries
than in the US and developed countries,
but it’s subsidized here as well.
But everywhere in the world,
wind and solar will be cheaper
as a source of electricity
than fossil fuels,
within a few years.
CA: I think I’ve heard it said
that the fall in emissions
caused by the pandemic
isn’t that much more than, actually,
the fall that we will need
every single year
if we’re to meet emissions targets.
Is that true, and, if so,
doesn’t that seem impossibly daunting?
AG: It does seem daunting,
but first look at the number.
That number came from a study
a little over a year ago
released by the IPCC
as to what it would take to keep
the Earth’s temperatures from increasing
more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
And yes, the annual reductions
would be significant,
on the order of what we’ve seen
with the pandemic.
And yes, that does seem daunting.
However, we do have the opportunity
to make some fairly dramatic changes,
and the plan is not a mystery.
You start with the two sectors that are
closest to an effective transition –
electricity generation, as I mentioned –
and last year, 2019,
if you look at all of the new
electricity generation built
all around the world,
72 percent of it was from solar and wind.
And already, without the continuing
subsidies for fossil fuels,
we would see many more of these plants
being shut down.
There are some new
fossil plants being built,
but many more are being shut down.
And where transportation is concerned,
the second sector ready to go,
in addition to the cheaper prices
for EVs that I made reference to before,
there are some 45 jurisdictions
around the world –
national, regional and municipal –
where laws have been passed
beginning a phaseout
of internal combustion engines.
Even India said that by 2030,
less than 10 years from now,
it will be illegal to sell
any new internal combustion engines
in India.
There are many other examples.
So the past small reductions
may not be an accurate guide
to the kind we can achieve
with serious national plans
and a focused global effort.
CA: So help us understand
just the big picture here, Al.
I think before the pandemic,
the world was emitting
about 55 gigatons of what
they call “CO2 equivalent,”
so that includes other greenhouse gases
like methane dialed up
to be the equivalent of CO2.
And am I right in saying that the IPCC,
which is the global
organization of scientists,
is recommending that
the only way to fix this crisis
is to get that number from 55 to zero
by 2050 at the very latest,
and that even then, there’s a chance
that we will end up with temperature rises
more like two degrees Celsius
rather than 1.5?
I mean, is that approximately
the big picture
of what the IPCC is recommending?
AG: That’s correct.
The global goal established
in the Paris Conference
is to get to net zero on a global basis
by 2050,
and many people quickly add
that that really means a 45
to 50 percent reduction by 2030
to make that pathway
to net zero feasible.
CA: And that kind of timeline
is the kind of timeline
where people couldn’t even imagine it.
It’s just hard to think
of policy over 30 years.
So that’s actually a very good shorthand,
that humanity’s task is to cut
emissions in half by 2030,
approximately speaking,
which I think boils down to about
a seven or eight percent reduction a year,
something like that, if I’m not wrong.
AG: Not quite. Not quite that large
but close, yes.
CA: So it is something like the effect
that we’ve experienced this year
may be necessary.
This year, we’ve done it
by basically shutting down the economy.
You’re talking about a way of doing it
over the coming years
that actually gives some
economic growth and new jobs.
So talk more about that.
You’ve referred to
changing our energy sources,
changing how we transport.
If we did those things,
how much of the problem does that solve?
AG: Well, we can get to –
well, in addition to doing
the two sectors that I mentioned,
we also have to deal with manufacturing
and all the use cases
that require temperatures
of a thousand degrees Celsius,
and there are solutions there as well.
I’ll come back and mention an exciting one
that Germany has just embarked upon.
We also have to tackle
regenerative agriculture.
There is the opportunity
to sequester a great deal of carbon
in topsoils around the world
by changing the agricultural techniques.
There is a farmer-led movement to do that.
We need to also retrofit buildings.
We need to change our management
of forests and the ocean.
But let me just mention
two things briefly.
First of all, the high
temperature use cases.
Angela Merkel, just 10 days ago,
with the leadership of
her minister Peter Altmaier,
who is a good friend
and a great public servant,
have just embarked on
a green hydrogen strategy
to make hydrogen
with zero marginal cost renewable energy.
And just a word on that, Chris:
you’ve heard about the intermittency
of wind and solar –
solar doesn’t produce electricity
when the sun’s not shining,
and wind doesn’t
when the wind’s not blowing –
but batteries are getting better,
and these technologies are becoming
much more efficient and powerful,
so that for an increasing number
of hours of each day,
they’re producing often way more
electricity than can be used.
So what to do with it?
The marginal cost
for the next kilowatt-hour is zero.
So all of a sudden,
the very energy-intensive process
of cracking hydrogen from water
becomes economically feasible,
and it can be substituted
for coal and gas,
and that’s already being done.
There’s a Swedish company
already making steel with green hydrogen,
and, as I say, Germany has just embarked
on a major new initiative to do that.
I think they’re pointing the way
for the rest of the world.
Now, where building retrofits
are concerned, just a moment on this,
because about 20 to 25 percent
of the global warming pollution
in the world and in the US
comes from inefficient buildings
that were constructed
by companies and individuals
who were trying to be competitive
in the marketplace
and keep their margins acceptably high
and thereby skimping on insulation
and the right windows
and LEDs and the rest.
And yet the person or company
that buys that building
or leases that building,
they want their monthly
utility bills much lower.
So there are now ways
to close that so-called
agent-principal divide,
the differing incentives
for the builder and occupier,
and we can retrofit buildings with
a program that literally pays for itself
over three to five years,
and we could put tens of millions
of people to work
in jobs that by definition
cannot be outsourced
because they exist
in every single community.
And we really ought to get serious
about doing this,
because we’re going to need all those jobs
to get sustainable prosperity
in the aftermath of this pandemic.
CA: Just going back
to the hydrogen economy
that you referred to there,
when some people hear that,
they think, “Oh, are you talking
about hydrogen-fueled cars?”
And they’ve heard that that
probably won’t be a winning strategy.
But you’re thinking much more
broadly than that, I think,
that it’s not just hydrogen
as a kind of storage mechanism
to act as a buffer for renewable energy,
but also hydrogen could be essential
for some of the other processes
in the economy like making steel,
making cement,
that are fundamentally
carbon-intensive processes right now
but could be transformed if we had
much cheaper sources of hydrogen.
Is that right?
AG: Yes, I was always skeptical
about hydrogen, Chris,
principally because it’s been
so expensive to make it,
to “crack it out of water,” as they say.
But the game-changer has been
the incredible abundance
of solar and wind electricity
in volumes and amounts
that people didn’t expect,
and all of a sudden,
it’s cheap enough to use
for these very energy-intensive processes
like creating green hydrogen.
I’m still a bit skeptical
about using it in vehicles.
Toyota’s been betting on that for 25 years
and it hasn’t really worked for them.
Never say never, maybe it will,
but I think it’s most useful for these
high-temperature industrial processes,
and we already have a pathway
for decarbonizing transportation
with electricity
that’s working extremely well.
Tesla’s going to be soon the most valuable
automobile company in the world,
already in the US,
and they’re about to overtake Toyota.
There is now a semitruck company
that’s been stood up by Tesla
and another that is going to be a hybrid
with electricity and green hydrogen,
so we’ll see whether or not
they can make it work in that application.
But I think electricity is preferable
for cars and trucks.
CA: We’re coming to some
community questions in a minute.
Let me ask you, though, about nuclear.
Some environmentalists
believe that nuclear,
or maybe new generation nuclear power
is an essential part of the equation
if we’re to get to a truly clean future,
a clean energy future.
Are you still pretty skeptical
on nuclear, Al?
AG: Well, the market’s skeptical
about it, Chris.
It’s been a crushing disappointment
for me and for so many.
I used to represent Oak Ridge,
where nuclear energy began,
and when I was a young congressman,
I was a booster.
I was very enthusiastic about it.
But the cost overruns
and the problems in building these plants
have become so severe
that utilities just don’t have
an appetite for them.
It’s become the most expensive
source of electricity.
Now, let me hasten to add
that there are some older nuclear reactors
that have more useful time
that could be added onto their lifetimes.
And like a lot of environmentalists,
I’ve come to the view
that if they can be determined to be safe,
they should be allowed to continue
operating for a time.
But where new nuclear
power plants are concerned,
here’s a way to look at it.
If you are – you’ve been a CEO, Chris.
If you were the CEO of –
I guess you still are.
If you were the CEO
of an electric utility,
and you told your executive team,
“I want to build a nuclear power plant,”
two of the first questions
you would ask are, number one:
How much will it cost?
And there’s not a single
engineering consulting firm
that I’ve been able to find
anywhere in the world
that will put their name on an opinion
giving you a cost estimate.
They just don’t know.
A second question you would ask is:
How long will it take to build it,
so we can start selling the electricity?
And again, the answer you will get is,
“We have no idea.”
So if you don’t know
how much it’s going to cost,
and you don’t know
when it’s going to be finished,
and you already know that
the electricity is more expensive
than the alternate ways to produce it,
that’s going to be a little discouraging,
and, in fact, that’s been the case
for utilities around the world.
CA: OK.
So there’s definitely
an interesting debate there,
but we’re going to come on
to some community questions.
Let’s have the first
of those questions up, please.
From Prosanta Chakrabarty:
“People who are skeptical
of COVID and of climate change
seem to be skeptical
of science in general.
It may be that the singular
message from scientists
gets diluted and convoluted.
How do we fix that?”
AG: Yeah, that’s
a great question, Prosanta.
Boy, I’m trying to put this
succinctly and shortly.
I think that there has been
a feeling that experts in general
have kind of let the US down,
and that feeling is much more pronounced
in the US than in most other countries.
And I think that the considered opinion
of what we call experts
has been diluted over the last few decades
by the unhealthy dominance
of big money in our political system,
which has found ways
to really twist economic policy
to benefit elites.
And this sounds a little radical,
but it’s actually what has happened.
And we have gone for more than 40 years
without any meaningful increase
in middle-income pay,
and where the injustice experienced
by African Americans
and other communities
of color are concerned,
the differential in pay between
African Americans and majority Americans
is the same as it was in 1968,
and the family wealth,
the net worth –
it takes 11 and a half so-called
“typical” African American families
to make up the net worth of one
so-called “typical” White American family.
And you look at the soaring incomes
in the top one
or the top one-tenth of one percent,
and people say, “Wait a minute.
Whoever the experts were
that designed these policies,
they haven’t been doing
a good job for me.”
A final point, Chris:
there has been an assault on reason.
There has been a war against truth.
There has been a strategy,
maybe it was best known as a strategy
decades ago by the tobacco companies
who hired actors and dressed them up
as doctors to falsely reassure people
that there were no health consequences
from smoking cigarettes,
and a hundred million people
died as a result.
That same strategy of diminishing
the significance of truth,
diminishing, as someone said,
the authority of knowledge,
I think that has made it
kind of open season
on any inconvenient truth –
forgive another buzz phrase,
but it is apt.
We cannot abandon our devotion
to the best available evidence
tested in reasoned discourse
and used as the basis
for the best policies we can form.
CA: Is it possible, Al,
that one consequence of the pandemic
is actually a growing number of people
have revisited their opinions
on scientists?
I mean, you’ve had a chance
in the last few months to say,
“Do I trust my political leader
or do I trust this scientist
in terms of what they’re saying
about this virus?”
Maybe lessons from that
could be carried forward?
AG: Well, you know, I think
if the polling is accurate,
people do trust their doctors
a lot more than some of the politicians
who seem to have a vested interest
in pretending the pandemic isn’t real.
And if you look at the incredible bust
at President Trump’s rally in Tulsa,
a stadium of 19,000 people
with less than one-third filled,
according to the fire marshal,
you saw all the empty seats
if you saw the news clips,
so even the most loyal Trump supporters
must have decided to trust their doctors
and the medical advice
rather than Dr. Donald Trump.
CA: With a little help from
the TikTok generation, perchance.
AG: Well, but that didn’t
affect the turnout.
What they did, very cleverly,
and I’m cheering them on,
what they did was affect
the Trump White House’s expectations.
They’re the reason why he went out
a couple days beforehand
and said, “We’ve had
a million people sign up.”
But they didn’t prevent –
they didn’t take seats that others
could have otherwise taken.
They didn’t affect the turnout,
just the expectations.
CA: OK, let’s have our next question here.
“Are you concerned the world will rush
back to the use of the private car
out of fear of using
shared public transportation?”
AG: Well, that could actually be
one of the consequences, absolutely.
Now, the trends on mass transit
were already inching
in the wrong direction
because of Uber and Lyft
and the ridesharing services,
and if autonomy ever reaches the goals
that its advocates have hoped for
then that may also have a similar effect.
But there’s no doubt that some people
are going to be probably
a little more reluctant
to take mass transportation
until the fear of this pandemic
is well and truly gone.
CA: Yeah. Might need
a vaccine on that one.
AG: (Laughs) Yeah.
CA: Next question.
Sonaar Luthra, thank you
for this question from LA.
“Given the temperature rise
in the Arctic this past week,
seems like the rate
we are losing our carbon sinks
like permafrost or forests
is accelerating faster than we predicted.
Are our models too focused
on human emissions?”
Interesting question.
AG: Well, the models are focused
on the factors that have led
to these incredible temperature spikes
in the north of the Arctic Circle.
They were predicted,
they have been predicted,
and one of the reasons for it
is that as the snow and ice cover melts,
the sun’s incoming rays are no longer
reflected back into space
at a 90 percent rate,
and instead, when they fall on
the dark tundra or the dark ocean,
they’re absorbed at a 90 percent rate.
So that’s a magnifier
of the warming in the Arctic,
and this has been predicted.
There are a number of other consequences
that are also in the models,
but some of them
may have to be recalibrated.
The scientists are freshly concerned
that the emissions of both CO2 and methane
from the thawing tundra
could be larger than they
had hoped they would be.
There’s also just been a brand-new study.
I won’t spend time on this,
because it deals with a kind of geeky term
called “climate sensitivity,”
which has been a factor in the models
with large error bars
because it’s so hard to pin down.
But the latest evidence
indicates, worryingly,
that the sensitivity may be
greater than they had thought,
and we will have
an even more daunting task.
That shouldn’t discourage us.
I truly believe that once
we cross this tipping point,
and I do believe we’re doing it now,
as I’ve said,
then I think we’re going
to find a lot of ways
to speed up the emissions reductions.
CA: We’ll take one more question
from the community.
Haha. “Geoengineering
is making extraordinary progress.
Exxon is investing in technology
from Global Thermostat
that seems promising.
What do you think of these air and water
carbon capture technologies?”
Stephen Petranek.
AG: Yeah. Well, you and I have
talked about this before, Chris.
I’ve been strongly opposed
to conducting an unplanned
global experiment
that could go wildly wrong,
and most are really
scared of that approach.
However, the term “geoengineering”
is a nuanced term that covers a lot.
If you want to paint roofs white
to reflect more energy
from the cityscapes,
that’s not going to bring a danger
of a runaway effect,
and there are some other things
that are loosely called “geoengineering”
like that, which are fine.
But the idea of blocking out
the sun’s rays –
that’s insane in my opinion.
Turns out plants need sunlight
for photosynthesis
and solar panels need sunlight
for producing electricity
from the sun’s rays.
And the consequences of changing
everything we know
and pretending that the consequences
are going to precisely cancel out
the unplanned experiment of global warming
that we already have underway,
you know, there are
glitches in our thinking.
One of them is called
the “single solution bias,”
and there are people
who just have a hunger to say,
“Well, that one solution, we just need
to latch on to that and do that,
and damn the consequences.”
Well, it’s nuts.
CA: But let me push back on this
just a little bit.
So let’s say that we agree
that a single solution,
all-or-nothing attempt
at geoengineering is crazy.
But there are scenarios where the world
looks at emissions and just sees,
in 10 years’ time, let’s say,
that they are just not
coming down fast enough
and that we are at risk
of several other liftoff events
where this train will just
get away from us,
and we will see temperature rises
of three, four, five, six, seven degrees,
and all of civilization is at risk.
Surely, there is an approach
to geoengineering
that could be modeled, in a way,
on the way that we approach medicine.
Like, for hundreds of years,
we don’t really understand the human body,
people would try interventions,
and some of them would work,
and some of them wouldn’t.
No one says in medicine, “You know,
go in and take an all-or-nothing decision
on someone’s life,”
but they do say, “Let’s try some stuff.”
If an experiment can be reversible,
if it’s plausible in the first place,
if there’s reason to think
that it might work,
we actually owe it to
the future health of humanity
to try at least some types of tests
to see what could work.
So, small tests to see
whether, for example,
seeding of something in the ocean
might create, in a nonthreatening way,
carbon sinks.
Or maybe, rather than filling
the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide,
a smaller experiment
that was not that big a deal
to see whether, cost-effectively, you
could reduce the temperature a little bit.
Surely, that isn’t completely crazy
and is at least something
we should be thinking about
in case these other measures don’t work?
AG: Well, there’ve already been
such experiments
to seed the ocean
to see if that can increase
the uptake of CO2.
And the experiments
were an unmitigated failure,
as many predicted they would be.
But that, again, is the kind of approach
that’s very different
from putting tinfoil strips
in the atmosphere orbiting the Earth.
That was the way that solar
geoengineering proposal started.
Now they’re focusing on chalk,
so we have chalk dust all over everything.
But more serious than that is the fact
that it might not be reversible.
CA: But, Al, that’s the rhetoric response.
The amount of dust that you need
to drop by a degree or two
wouldn’t result in chalk dust
over everything.
It would be unbelievably –
like, it would be less than the dust
that people experience every day, anyway.
I mean, I just –
AG: First of all, I don’t know
how you do a small experiment
in the atmosphere.
And secondly,
if we were to take that approach,
we would have to steadily
increase the amount
of whatever substance they decided.
We’d have to increase
it every single year,
and if we ever stopped,
then there would be a sudden snapback,
like “The Picture of Dorian Gray,”
that old book and movie,
where suddenly all of the things
caught up with you at once.
The fact that anyone is even
considering these approaches, Chris,
is a measure of a feeling of desperation
that some have begun to feel,
which I understand,
but I don’t think it should drive us
toward these reckless experiments.
And by the way, using your analogy
to experimental cancer treatments,
for example,
you usually get informed consent
from the patient.
Getting informed consent
from 7.8 billion people
who have no voice and no say,
who are subject to the potentially
catastrophic consequences
of this wackadoodle proposal
that somebody comes up with
to try to rearrange
the entire Earth’s atmosphere
and hope and pretend
that it’s going to cancel out,
the fact that we’re putting
152 million tons
of heat-trapping, manmade
global warming pollution
into the sky every day.
That’s what’s really insane.
A scientist decades ago
compared it this way.
He said, if you had two people
on a sinking boat
and one of them says,
“You know, we could probably use
some mirrors to signal to shore
to get them to build
a sophisticated wave-generating machine
that will cancel out
the rocking of the boat
by these guys in the back of the boat.”
Or you could get them
to stop rocking the boat.
And that’s what we need to do.
We need to stop what’s causing the crisis.
CA: Yeah, that’s a great story,
but if the effort to stop the people
rocking in the back of the boat
is as complex as the scientific
proposal you just outlined,
whereas the experiment to stop the waves
is actually as simple as telling
the people to stop rocking the boat,
that story changes.
And I think you’re right that
the issue of informed consent
is a really challenging one,
but, I mean, no one gave informed consent
to do all of the other things
we’re doing to the atmosphere.
And I agree that the moral hazard issue
is worrying,
that if we became dependent
on geoengineering
and took away our efforts to do the rest,
that would be tragic.
It just seems like,
I wish it was possible
to have a nuanced debate
of people saying, you know what,
there’s multiple dials
to a very complex problem.
We’re going to have to adjust
several of them very, very carefully
and keep talking to each other.
Wouldn’t that be a goal
to just try and have
a more nuanced debate about this,
rather than all of that geoengineering
can’t work?
AG: Well, I’ve said some of it,
you know, the benign forms
that I’ve mentioned,
I’m not ruling those out.
But blocking the Sun’s rays
from the Earth,
not only do you affect 7.8 billion people,
you affect the plants
and the animals
and the ocean currents
and the wind currents
and natural processes
that we’re in danger
of disrupting even more.
Techno-optimism is something
I’ve engaged in in the past,
but to latch on to some
brand-new technological solution
to rework the entire Earth’s
natural system
because somebody thinks he’s clever enough
to do it in a way
that precisely cancels out
the consequences of using
the atmosphere as an open sewer
for heat-trapping manmade gases.
It’s much more important to stop using
the atmosphere as an open sewer.
That’s what the problem is.
CA: All right, well, we’ll agree that that
is the most important thing, for sure,
and speaking of which,
do you believe the world
needs carbon pricing,
and is there any prospect
for getting there?
AG: Yes. Yes to both questions.
For decades, almost every economist
who is asked about the climate crisis
says, “Well, we just need
to put a price on carbon.”
And I have certainly been
in favor of that approach.
But it is daunting.
Nevertheless, there are
43 jurisdictions around the world
that already have a price on carbon.
We’re seeing it in Europe.
They finally straightened out
their carbon pricing mechanism.
It’s an emissions trading version of it.
We have places that have put
a tax on carbon.
That’s the approach the economists prefer.
China is beginning to implement
its national emissions trading program.
California and quite a few other states
in the US are already doing it.
It can be given back to people
in a revenue-neutral way.
But the opposition to it, Chris,
which you’ve noted,
is impressive enough
that we do have to take other approaches,
and I would say most climate activists
are now saying, look,
let’s don’t make the best
the enemy of the better.
There are other ways to do this as well.
We need every solution
we can rationally employ,
including by regulation.
And often, when the political difficulty
of a proposal becomes too difficult
in a market-oriented approach,
the fallback is with regulation,
and it’s been given
a bad name, regulation,
but many places are doing it.
I mentioned phasing out
internal combustion engines.
That’s an example.
There are 160 cities in the US
that have already by regulation ordered
that within a date certain,
100 percent of all their electricity
will have to come from renewable sources.
And again, the market forces that
are driving the cost of renewable energy
and sustainability solutions
ever downward,
that gives us the wind at our back.
This is working in our favor.
CA: I mean, the pushback on carbon pricing
often goes further from parts
of the environmental movement,
which is to a pushback
on the role of business in general.
Business is actually – well,
capitalism – is blamed
for the climate crisis
because of unrelenting growth,
to the point where many people
don’t trust business
to be part of the solution.
The only way to go forward
is to regulate,
to force businesses to do the right thing.
Do you think that business
has to be part of the solution?
AG: Well, definitely,
because the allocation of capital
needed to solve this crisis
is greater than what
governments can handle.
And businesses are beginning,
many businesses are beginning
to play a very constructive role.
They’re getting a demand that they do so
from their customers,
from their investors,
from their boards,
from their executive teams,
from their families.
And by the way,
the rising generation is demanding
a brighter future,
and when CEOs interview
potential new hires,
they find that the new hires
are interviewing them.
They want to make a nice income,
but they want to be able to tell
their family and friends and peers
that they’re doing something
more than just making money.
One illustration of how
this new generation is changing, Chris:
there are 65 colleges in the US right now
where the College Young Republican Clubs
have joined together
to jointly demand that
the Republican National Committee
change its policy on climate,
lest they lose that entire generation.
This is a global phenomenon.
The Greta Generation is now leading this
in so many ways,
and if you look at the polling,
again, the vast majority
of young Republicans
are demanding a change on climate policy.
This is really a movement
that is building still.
CA: I was going to ask you about that,
because one of the most painful things
over the last 20 years
has just been how climate
has been politicized,
certainly in the US.
You’ve probably felt yourself
at the heart of that a lot of the time,
with people attacking you personally
in the most merciless,
and unfair ways, often.
Do you really see signs
that that might be changing,
led by the next generation?
AG: Yeah, there’s no question about it.
I don’t want to rely on polls too much.
I’ve mentioned them already.
But there was a new one that came out
that looked at the wavering
Trump supporters,
those who supported him
strongly in the past
and want to do so again.
The number one issue,
surprisingly to some,
that is giving them pause,
is the craziness of President Trump
and his administration on climate.
We’re seeing big majorities
of the Republican Party overall
saying that they’re ready
to start exploring some real solutions
to the climate crisis.
I think that we’re really getting there,
no question about it.
CA: I mean, you’ve been
the figurehead for raising this issue,
and you happen to be a Democrat.
Is there anything
that you can personally do
to – I don’t know – to open the tent,
to welcome people,
to try and say, “This is
beyond politics, dear friends”?
AG: Yeah. Well, I’ve tried
all of those things,
and maybe it’s made a little
positive difference.
I’ve worked with
the Republicans extensively.
And, you know, well after
I left the White House,
I had Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson
and other prominent Republicans
appear on national TV ads with me
saying we’ve got to solve
the climate crisis.
But the petroleum industry
has really doubled down
enforcing discipline
within the Republican Party.
I mean, look at the attacks
they’ve launched against the Pope
when he came out with his encyclical
and was demonized,
not by all for sure,
but there were hawks
in the anti-climate movement
who immediately started
training their guns on Pope Francis,
and there are many other examples.
They enforce discipline
and try to make it a partisan issue,
even as Democrats reach out
to try to make it bipartisan.
I totally agree with you
that it should not be a partisan issue.
It didn’t use to be,
but it’s been artificially
weaponized as an issue.
CA: I mean, the CEOs
of oil companies also have kids
who are talking to them.
It feels like some of them are moving
and are trying to invest
and trying to find ways
of being part of the future.
Do you see signs of that?
AG: Yeah.
I think that business leaders,
including in the oil and gas companies,
are hearing from their families.
They’re hearing from their friends.
They’re hearing from their employees.
And, by the way, we’ve seen
in the tech industry
some mass walkouts by employees
who are demanding
that some of the tech companies
do more and get serious.
I’m so proud of Apple.
Forgive me for parenthetically
praising Apple.
You know, I’m on the board,
but I’m such a big fan of Tim Cook
and my colleagues at Apple.
It’s an example of a tech company
that’s really doing fantastic things.
And there’s some others as well.
There are others in many industries.
But the pressures on
the oil and gas companies
are quite extraordinary.
You know, BP just wrote down
12 and a half billion dollars' worth
of oil and gas assets
and said that they’re never
going to see the light of day.
Two-thirds of the fossil fuels
that have already been discovered
cannot be burned and will not be burned.
And so that’s a big economic risk
to the global economy,
like the subprime mortgage crisis.
We’ve got 22 trillion dollars
of subprime carbon assets,
and just yesterday,
there was a major report
that the fracking industry in the US
is seeing now a wave of bankruptcies
because the price
of the fracked gas and oil
has fallen below levels
that make them economic.
CA: Is the shorthand
of what’s happened there
that electric cars and electric
technologies and solar and so forth
have helped drive down the price of oil
to the point where
huge amounts of the reserves
just can’t be developed profitably?
AG: Yes, that’s it.
That’s mainly it.
The projections for energy sources
in the next several years
uniformly predict that electricity
from wind and solar
is going to continue to plummet in price,
and therefore using gas or coal
to make steam to turn the turbines
is just not going to be economical.
Similarly, the electrification
of the transportation sector
is having the same effect.
Some are also looking at the trend
in national, regional
and local governance.
I mentioned this before,
but they’re predicting
a very different energy future.
But let me come back, Chris,
because we talked about business leaders.
I think you were getting in a question
a moment ago about capitalism itself,
and I do want to say a word on that,
because there are a lot of people who say
maybe capitalism is the basic problem.
I think the current form of capitalism
we have is desperately in need of reform.
The short-term outlook is often mentioned,
but the way we measure
what is of value to us
is also at the heart of the crisis
of modern capitalism.
Now, capitalism is at the base
of every successful economy,
and it balances supply and demand,
unlocks a higher fraction
of the human potential,
and it’s not going anywhere,
but it needs to be reformed,
because the way we measure
what’s valuable now
ignores so-called negative externalities
like pollution.
It also ignores positive externalities
like investments
in education and health care,
mental health care, family services.
It ignores the depletion of resources
like groundwater and topsoil
and the web of living species.
And it ignores the distribution
of incomes and net worths,
so when GDP goes up, people cheer,
two percent, three percent – wow! –
four percent, and they think, “Great!”
But it’s accompanied
by vast increases in pollution,
chronic underinvestment in public goods,
the depletion of irreplaceable
natural resources,
and the worst inequality crisis we’ve seen
in more than a hundred years
that is threatening the future
of both capitalism and democracy.
So we have to change it.
We have to reform it.
CA: So reform capitalism,
but don’t throw it out.
We’re going to need it as a tool
as we go forward
if we’re to solve this.
AG: Yeah, I think that’s right,
and just one other point:
the worst environmental abuses
in the last hundred years
have been in jurisdictions
that experimented during the 20th century
with the alternatives to capitalism
on the left and right.
CA: Interesting. All right.
Two last community questions quickly.
Chadburn Blomquist:
“As you are reading the tea leaves
of the impact of the current pandemic,
what do you think in regard to
our response to combatting climate change
will be the most impactful
lesson learned?”
AG: Boy, that’s a very
thoughtful question,
and I wish my answer could rise
to the same level on short notice.
I would say first,
don’t ignore the scientists.
When there is virtual unanimity
among the scientific and medical experts,
pay attention.
Don’t let some politician dissuade you.
I think President Trump is slowly learning
that’s it’s kind of difficult
to gaslight a virus.
He tried to gaslight the virus in Tulsa.
It didn’t come off very well,
and tragically, he decided
to recklessly roll the dice a month ago
and ignore the recommendations
for people to wear masks
and to socially distance
and to do the other things,
and I think that lesson
is beginning to take hold
in a much stronger way.
But beyond that, Chris,
I think that this period of time
has been characterized
by one of the most profound opportunities
for people to rethink
the patterns of their lives
and to consider whether or not
we can’t do a lot of things better
and differently.
And I think that this rising
generation I mentioned before
has been even more profoundly affected
by this interlude,
which I hope ends soon,
but I hope the lessons endure.
I expect they will.
CA: Yeah, it’s amazing how many things
you can do without emitting carbon,
that we’ve been forced to do.
Let’s have one more question here.
Frank Hennessy: “Are you encouraged
by the ability of people
to quickly adapt to the new
normal due to COVID-19
as evidence that people can and will
change their habits
to respond to climate change?”
AG: Yes, but I think we have
to keep in mind
that there is a crisis within this crisis.
The impact on the African American
community, which I mentioned before,
on the Latinx community,
Indigenous peoples.
The highest infection rate
is in the Navajo Nation right now.
So some of these questions
appear differently
to those who are really
getting the brunt of this crisis,
and it is unacceptable
that we allow this to continue.
It feels one way to you and me
and perhaps to many in our audience today,
but for low-income communities of color,
it’s an entirely different crisis,
and we owe it to them
and to all of us
to get busy and to start
using the best science
and solve this pandemic.
You know the phrase “pandemic economics.”
Somebody said, the first principle
of pandemic economics
is take care of the pandemic,
and we’re not doing that yet.
We’re seeing the president
try to goose the economy
for his reelection,
never mind the prediction
of tens of thousands
of additional American deaths,
and that is just
unforgivable in my opinion.
CA: Thank you, Frank.
So Al, you, along with others
in the community played a key role
in encouraging TED to launch
this initiative called “Countdown.”
Thank you for that,
and I guess this conversation
is continuing among many of us.
If you’re interested
in climate, watching this,
check out the Countdown website,
countdown.ted.com,
and be part of 10/10/2020,
when we are trying
to put out an alert to the world
that climate can’t wait,
that it really matters,
and there’s going to be
some amazing content
free to the world on that day.
Thank you, Al, for your inspiration
and support in doing that.
I wonder whether you
could end today’s session
just by painting us a picture,
like how might things roll out
over the next decade or so?
Just tell us whether there is still
a story of hope here.
AG: I’d be glad to.
I’ve got to get one plug in.
I’ll make it brief.
July 18 through July 26,
The Climate Reality Project
is having a global training.
We’ve already had 8,000 people register.
You can go to climatereality.com.
Now, a bright future.
It begins with all of the kinds of efforts
that you’ve thrown yourself into
in organizing Countdown.
Chris, you and your team have been amazing
to work with,
and I’m so excited
about the Countdown project.
TED has an unparalleled ability
to spread ideas that are worth spreading,
to raise consciousness,
to enlighten people around the world,
and it’s needed for climate
and the solutions to the climate crisis
like it’s never been needed before,
and I just want to thank you
for what you personally are doing
to organize this fantastic
Countdown program.
CA: Thank you.
And the world? Are we going to do this?
Do you think that humanity
is going to pull this off
and that our grandchildren
are going to have beautiful lives
where they can celebrate nature
and not spend every day
in fear of the next tornado or tsunami?
AG: I am optimistic that we will do it,
but the answer is in our hands.
We have seen dark times
in periods of the past,
and we have risen to meet the challenge.
We have limitations of our long
evolutionary heritage
and elements of our culture,
but we also have the ability
to transcend our limitations,
and when the chips are down,
and when survival is at stake
and when our children
and future generations are at stake,
we’re capable of more than we sometimes
allow ourselves to think we can do.
This is such a time.
I believe we will rise to the occasion,
and we will create a bright,
clean, prosperous, just and fair future.
I believe it with all my heart.
CA: Al Gore, thank you
for your life of work,
for all you’ve done to elevate this issue
and for spending this time with us now.
Thank you.
AG: Back at you. Thank you.