Al Gore Plans to Break Petrostates’ Stranglehold on Climate Progress
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“This isn't working.”
That’s what former US vice president Al Gore had to say about the COP negotiation process during a sit-down this week with Zero host Akshat Rathi at the Bloomberg Green Summit at COP28. In a candid conversation, Gore took aim at requirements from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that COP agreements must be achieved through consensus, arguing that it prevents commitments from being as strong and scientifically sound as they need to be to limit warming.
Consensus isn’t the same as unanimity: The power to declare consensus ultimately lies with the COP president. It’s a dynamic Gore said exacerbates the power imbalance if “Vanuatu or one of the other small, most threatened nations near the back of the chamber is waving their arms to object” and the COP president ignores those protestations while allowing more powerful countries’ objections to stand. This year’s COP president is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also president of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. Major oil-producing nations such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Russia are among those powerful countries capable of stymieing progress; Gore referred to this cohort as petrostates (though the US is also among the world’s top producers of oil and gas). “The situation that leaves our world community in is that we have to beg for permission from the petrostates,” he said. “‘Please, sir, may we protect the future of humanity?’ ‘No, sorry.’”
The only way to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as science suggests is necessary, Gore said, may be to break from consensus and allow a super-majority to finalize a COP agreement. He conceded that such a move would be controversial, but argued that “if this go-along-to-get-along consensus-begging permission from the petrostates is not producing solutions, we have to change the process.” Gore said he plans to advocate for such a change, and “to do my best to round up some advocates who will also do so.”
“Too much is at stake,” he said. “We can't just go along to get along forever. There have been 28 of these COPs now.”Listen to the full episode and learn more about Zero here. Subscribe on Apple or Spotify to stay on top of new episodes.
Our transcripts are generated by a combination of software and human editors, and may contain slight differences between the text and audio. Please confirm in audio before quoting in print.Akshat Rathi 0:01
Welcome to Zero, I’m Akshat Rathi. Today: sewers, sanity, and solutions.
Here in Dubai, some 100,000 people have arrived for COP28 from all around the world. For many, it’s their first COP, and they have had to grapple with unfamiliar settings, abundant legalese and an intense schedule of meetings. Others have been here since the start. COP is familiar ground. Former US vice president Al Gore is in the latter camp.
But he’s much more than a COP goer. Many of today’s climate activists have told me that Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth was the reason they became activists in the first place. The movie won an Academy Award in 2007 and also bagged him that year’s Nobel Peace Prize alongside the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But he’s been at it for much longer: He held hearings on climate change in the US Congress as far back as 1976.
He became the de facto spokesman for climate change. In recent years and especially before this climate conference, he’s become much more vocal in calling out the villains. He has castigated the role of petrostates and oil companies in shaping the COP agenda, saying they’ve “taken the disguise off” and are not good faith partners.
I spoke with Al Gore at the Bloomberg Green Summit at COP28 in Dubai to ask him how to break the stranglehold petrostates have over COP, why tackling climate change solves many other major problems, and why big emitters can no longer hide.
Al Gore 1:56
Thank you. Thank you very much. Enthusiastic fan of your new book.
Akshat Rathi 2:08
Thank you for your time. It’s very precious.
Al Gore 2:11
Thank you for inviting me.
Akshat Rathi 2:12
Now, let's start with something that you make very clear. You say we use our atmosphere as a sewer. We dump 162 million tons of CO2 in it every day. You're also absolutely clear that COP28 must have countries agreeing to phasing out fossil fuels without any caveats, if it is to make any progress on this real crisis. But the reason it has taken us until COP28 to even talk about phasing out fossil fuels, is because of what happened at COP1 in Berlin in 1995. You, you were there? That's when it was decided that the progress at COPs can only happen through consensus? Why are we stuck with this process that only produces the minimum viable progress that every country, including petrostates agree on?
Al Gore 3:06
Well, thank you for inviting me. And thank you for this question. I want to make a brief passing comment about that thin blue line that you referred to. I always want to make the point so that it really sinks in, if anybody hasn't really looked into this. That thin blue line is blue because that's where the oxygen is that reflects the blue light, with nitrogen. You got a PhD in this stuff. So I have to be careful what I say. But if you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds, you’d get to the top of it in five to seven minutes. You could walk it in an hour. That's what we're using as an open sewer. And it lingers there, on average, each molecule stays 100 years. And the accumulated amount now traps as much extra heat, as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding on the Earth every 24 hours. So it's not a good thing. We need to stop doing this. And the reason we've had such difficulty even discussing the main problem directly for all of these years since the summer of 1992, I was in Rio at the Earth Summit. It took three years to organize the first COP. The President was a charismatic young environment minister from Germany, Angela Merkel. And the first order of business was to adopt the rules for voting and Saudi Arabia objected. And since consensus was required before the rules were adopted, it was laid on the table. There was a very famous, in those days very famous, coal lobbyist from the United States named Don Pearlman, never speak ill of the departed. But he was extremely influential, really legendary, working hand in glove with the Saudi Arabian delegation. And so since the rules could not be adopted over Saudi Arabia's objections, the default procedure was the requirement for consensus.
And the word consensus differs in definition from unanimity in the eye of the President of the COP. So the enormous power wielded by the president of a COP, any COP, comes from the discretion that person has as, as the moderator, chair, presiding officer, to either recognize an objection or not, and there have been plenty of times as you know, Akshat, where Vanuatu or some one of the other small, most threatened nations, near the back of the chamber is waving their arms to object. ‘Oh, well, seeing no objection, so ordered.’ But if the Saudi delegation wherever they are raises their hand, ‘Well, no, we don't have consensus. Sorry.’ And so the situation that leaves our world community in is that we have to beg for permission from the petrostates. ‘Please, sir, may we protect the future of humanity?’ ‘No, sorry.’ And yesterday, Abdulaziz bin Salman, the energy minister in Saudi Arabia gave an interview on television in Riyadh and was asked, not about a measure of phase out fossil fuels, which of course, is what we need, but a measure to phase down fossil fuels. Would you accept that? He said, ‘Absolutely not.’ So here we are, once again, we have to go to the largest petrostate and say, ‘May we have your permission to do something to protect our grandchildren and all future generations?’ ‘No. Absolutely not.’
Akshat Rathi 6:58
Well, you have said that there is a way to reform this COP process, it will require parties to bring a resolution six months ahead of a COP, it will require 75% of the party for voting in favor, to get rid of the consensus and put in place perhaps a supermajority or whatever the parties decide, but something that is not a consensus right. Now, do you think that can ever happen? Are you pushing for it? And who else needs to be involved to make it happen?
Al Gore 7:28
Yeah, I think it's difficult, extremely difficult, but I think it is time to push for it. Because the stakes are so high, we have to try every strategy to save our future. There's a detail that is important to emphasize, Akshat. The amendment has to be to the underlying treaty from Rio and 92. There are those international lawyers who will hear this proposal for reform and based on their knowledge of dealing with these COPs say ‘No, you can't do that.’ And they're right. If you just tried to amend the rules of the particular COP, you can't. But if you go back to the original treaty, all of these COPs are legally appended to the original treaty. And if you amend that original treaty, you can put in a supermajority proposal. There are two countries, Papua New Guinea and Mexico, I believe, that have jointly proposed this several times in the past. You're really on top of this, because you've already pointed out it has to be laid on the table six months before the COP, good for you. And it has not been this time. And of course, this is not the president of the COP to make this happen. But next time, it should be done. I do plan to argue in favor of that. And I do plan to do my best to round up some advocates who will also do so.
Akshat Rathi 9:00
You have made the case that the hegemonic system we have right now that produces the most progress is democratic capitalism. We'll come to the democracy part a little later. Let's focus on capitalism. After you left politics, you founded Generation Investment Management. It manages some $30 billion–
Al Gore 9:22
–it's 45. Not that it matters.
Akshat Rathi 9:26
Its goal is to show that it's possible to do good and to make money. An analysis by my colleague Saijel Kishan looked at one of those funds where you've invested in equities, and found that about half of the holdings had increase in emissions between 2015-2021, which is sort of the post-Paris period. Now, that's not the only thing that's happened. There's been a huge political backlash on ESG, the very metric that we can use to try and correct the problems that unfettered capitalism that does not take externalities into consideration has. But that backlash is causing many of the investors who could see the light who could figure out ‘Yes, there is a way in which capitalism isn't a problem for climate change, but the solution.’ So what needs to happen now? How do we figure out whether capitalism can play a positive role?
Al Gore 10:24
The author of Climate Capitalism, so I'll do my best to have this exchange with you. First of all, they're to funds, Dublin and London and sometimes the numbers are, you know, you have to add them both together. But in any case, I co-founded it with my partner David Blood, who was the CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management for 11 years and other partners. This is an old joke, but it's literally true that I wanted to name the business Blood and Gore but the other partners… I mean, I thought, instant brand recognition, I mean, you know, come on, but our other co-founders were not really enthusiastic about it, but the whole theory is to invest completely through the sustainability lens. Now on the large subjects you've raised, Akshat, and that you've studied and written about so eloquently, I have some idiosyncratic views about this. First of all, I am a capitalist. And I do believe that capitalism is in a way a bit like gravity in the sense that it's always there and always has been, and to pretend otherwise, is a waste of time. I think there are thoughtful people who disagree. But the alternatives to the left and right of market capitalism that were tried in the 20th century did not really work out too well. And I do think that with reforms, capitalism is the most useful tool to solve the climate crisis. In North America and the European Union… well North America, if you look at all of the capital that's been spent to deploy solar and wind, 96% of it is from the private sector, only 4% from public funding. Now, because of the unequal access to private lending in developing countries, because of currency valuation, fluctuation, risk and other country risks, those percentages are often reversed. In Nigeria, only 14% is from private capital for the renewable energy revolution, 86% has to come from governments and they don't have it. So we need to reform the access to borrowing capacity for developing countries. But the reforms need to go much deeper than that. And if you'll let me have just a moment on this, in the interwar period in the night in 1937, when economists were trying to give policymakers better tools to avoid another Great Depression, a great legendary economist named Simon Kuznets, came up with what are referred to as the national accounts. And most corporate accounting categories are derived from the national accounts. And it was a brilliant piece of work. But when he received his many prizes and awards, he made speeches and said, ‘Please do not use this system, these national accounts, as a guide for national economic policy, because it leaves too much out.’ And then seven years later, at Bretton Woods, it was completely codified. And we still use it. It's sort of like the old QWERTY keyboard on the typewriters, it makes no sense. But it's a difficult thing to change.
Akshat Rathi 14:09
This is the gross domestic product that we use to measure economic growth.
Al Gore 14:13
Yes, GDP is the version of it that is best known. But he said what is left out? Four categories of value. And of course, these accounting categories are how we determine and decide what is valuable in our lives and then the economy. What's left out. The first is fairly well known as almost a buzz phrase, negative externalities. All of the global warming pollution is a negative externality. It's not included in the accounting categories, government or corporate. The second thing that's left out is a little bit less well known, positive externalities. Now, what's that? If a community invests in mental health care, that's an expense on the town budget. When the benefits of that care, if it's delivered, will come rolling back in and in the years and even decades afterwards, that is not counted as income. So the structural bias is to avoid the expense because you're not getting any income as a result. The third category is depletion of natural resources. Now, there are three categories that really exemplify this part of the problem. Underground water aquifers, out of sight, out of mind, soon out of water. Topsoil, we are still losing enormous amounts of very valuable topsoil that can only be replaced over centuries. And then most important of all, the web of living species of which we humans are a part. We're in the middle of a great extinction crisis. And by some estimates, we could lose 50% of the living species with which we share this earth in this century, on our watch, that can't be good. And the fourth thing that's left out is the distribution of incomes and net worths, which are affected profoundly by things like tax policy, and regulatory policy. So if all four of those things are left out, you get this anomaly where, ‘Oh, GDP went up 3%. Oh my gosh, look, this country has gone up 5%. Yay, big cheers.’ But it's accompanied by vast increases in global warming, pollution, chronic underinvestment in public goods like education, and health care and mental health care and environmental protection, reckless depreciation of groundwater topsoil and the fraying of biodiversity. So GDP goes up and people celebrate. And it's accompanied by all these bad things plus the emergence of inequality that has morphed into hyper inequality. And when the vast majority of income goes to the top one-tenth of 1%, and the average middle class and most countries have no inflation-adjusted increase in income for 45 years, they vote for some demagogic populist authoritarian of which there are too many running around these days, including, I'm embarrassed to say, back in my country.
Akshat Rathi 17:42
Well, you knew I was going to ask you a democracy question next. We are sitting here in a petrostate, which has done arguably more in the region to move away from fossil fuels than other countries, yet a little less than 30% of its flawed gross domestic product–
Al Gore 17:58
When you say they've moved more away from... Didn’t you write the story that said Masdar is not operating 20 gigawatts of renewables, but only 3.2 gigawatts?
Akshat Rathi 18:10
I did, I did, yes.
Al Gore 18:12
Okay. Just wanted to double check that.
Akshat Rathi 18:22
Compared to Saudi Arabia;
Al Gore 18:23
Moving right along, moving right along.
Akshat Rathi 18:27
Compared to Saudi Arabia, the UAE--
Al Gore 18:35
--Yeah, a low bar to clear.
Akshat Rathi 18:35
Yes, low bar. It gets its income. Gross Domestic Product. So a lower bar. The US on the other hand gets only 3% of its gross domestic product from fossil fuels. Yet when the Republican party is in power, it acts like a petrostate, it does on climate change. So big question: What needs to be done to fix the democratic crisis in the US, the second biggest polluter annually, largest polluter historically to make it a credible partner in the climate fight not just under Joe Biden's leadership, but every president to come?
Al Gore 19:04
Yeah. Yeah, my country is the largest producer of oil now and largest producer of gas as well, more oil than Saudi Arabia, more gas than Qatar. But there is a transition underway and the IRA is, as most understand by far the best and biggest climate legislation any country's ever passed. But to your larger question. Akshat. Alongside the climate crisis, we also have a democracy crisis. And I've tried to understand the causes of this. And I believe that the, forgive the geeky phrase, the information ecosystem within which self government takes place is really important. And the institution as a representative democracy, innovated in the United States, were constructed during the age of the printing press. The shift from an information ecosystem based on print to one based on broadcasting and then moving on to the internet and to social media has disrupted the balances that used to exist that made representative democracy work much better. These centralized information systems tempt autocrats to control information. You know, Hitler's book, The Triumph of the Will, implies a question, triumph over what? One thing it triumphs over is the authority of knowledge. Because a free self-governing people rely on a shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together collectively. But if you have social media that is dominated by algorithms that pull people down these rabbit holes that are a bit like pitcher plants, these algorithms, they are the digital equivalent of AR-15, they ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned. It's an abuse of the public forum. But when people are pulled down these rabbit holes, you know what's at the bottom of the rabbit hole? That's where the echo chamber is. And if you spend too much time in the echo chamber, what's weaponized is another form of AI, not artificial intelligence, artificial insanity. I'm serious. I'm serious. QAnon is just the best known version of artificial insanity. And these devices are the enemies of self government, and they're the enemies of democracy. We need reforms for both democracy and capitalism. Both sets of reforms are possible.
Akshat Rathi 22:13
Well, it seems tackling climate change might be actually easier than trying to figure out how to fix democracy.
Al Gore 22:19
Well, we hear this new word polycrisis, so many different crises. I think that solving climate change is a polysolution. And I really believe that because we have a shared planetary priority to save humanity's future, we are in way more danger right now than most people realize. You're probably aware that one and a half million people in East Africa are forced from their homes today by another of the rain bombs. That's a direct consequence, much worse because of the climate crisis. You may be aware that this summer here in Dubai, the ‘feels like’ temperatures, the combination of temperature and humidity, have been up to 60 degrees [Celsius]. 62 degrees in China last year, hottest temperature ever. But we are now seeing a very real and present danger of a billion climate refugees crossing international borders to escape conditions that the scientists tell us are becoming physiologically unlivable. And if this authoritarian populism is provoked by a few million climate refugees coming from the Eastern Mediterranean to Hungary and Orbanland and whatever, what about a billion? Which is what The Lancet projects may be possible. So I honestly think that getting our collective act together in order to solve the climate crisis, could be the engine that pulls solutions for democracy and capitalism and the other the extinction crisis. Because if we can reconstruct an ability to share a common base of accepted knowledge and reason together towards solutions for our crises, I think that is the pathway to restoration of sanity and self governance.
Akshat Rathi 24:34
That’s where our onstage conversation at the Bloomberg Green summit finished, but I was able to get some more time with Al Gore backstage. That’s coming up after the break.
Akshat Rathi 24:52
One follow-up question from something we talked about on stage, we talked about moving to a supermajority system in the COP process. But not having a consensus, which is the current state, could also cause the process to be less credible than say the Paris Agreement, which was achieved through consensus. Do you foresee if there is a reform, as you argue for, that COPs become even more irrelevant than they already are?
Al Gore 25:21
I think they could become more controversial and difficult. But the old saying you got to break some eggs to make an omelet applies. And my view, well, this isn't working. This isn't working. We have seen a dramatic, almost miraculous rise in the deployment of solar and wind, electricity and electric vehicles and batteries. And regenerative agriculture is not far behind, and maybe green hydrogen as well. But we're still increasing the burning of fossil fuels every year. And that's simply got to stop. And if this go-along, get-along consensus-begging permission from the petrostates is not producing solutions, we have to change the process. Too much is at stake. We can't just go along to get along forever. There have been 28 of these COPs now. And the emissions are still going up every single year except for the pandemic and then they went right back up again up again after that we can't continue this. You know, the old cliche if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same terrible result. That's the definition of insanity. And we have to change this process.
Akshat Rathi 26:32
Now, in preparation for this interview we watched a lot of your interviews, a lot of your podcast chats, one of the things that I've seen has changed. You're a communicator of science, bar none. You're able to channel scientists and get the message across like no other. But you have also become angry, if I can say it that way. Your speeches have become so powerful. What has changed in this time of you trying to get the climate message out there?
Al Gore 27:02
I would not use the word anger, I would be comfortable with the word passionate, and I guess I can fully understand why some of it may come across as anger. Maybe I need to dial that back a little bit. But whatever word you use to describe it, the reason why I have been a lot more passionate in recent years, I guess, is because we're running out of time. It's that simple, really. And I was raised in a family and in a country that gave me the belief that reasonable people could discuss facts and attempt to come to some mutual agreement about what's more likely to be true than not. And then after a discourse and the full airing of disagreements, come to enough of a mutual understanding to use that as a basis for collective action. In my faith tradition, there is the saying, ‘Come let us reason together.’ And what we've witnessed, at least in my country, and I see it in quite a few others as well in recent years, is what seems to be a very cynical use by powerful corporations and individuals sometimes to manipulate the ways in which information is presented in the public square and to distort it. And then with repetition through advertising, to try to manhandle the process that used to be more organic, and used to result in the emergence of agreement.
I'll give you an example. When the scientists and doctors decades ago found out that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, that's the kind of new knowledge that used to serve as the basis for discussion and then mutual commitment. But the tobacco companies in response to a famous surgeon general's report in the US hired actors and dress them up to pretend to be doctors and put them on camera with their white coats and stethoscopes and had them look into the camera and with all of the affected sincerity they could muster with their theatrical skills, reassure people that there were no health consequences at all, and 100 million people died. And the same PR firms that came up with that strategy are now advising ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia and the team managing COP28.
Akshat Rathi 30:12
We are now on day six of this COP. And yet there has been progress or at least seemingly progress. There's the loss and damage fund. There's all this money being announced, which as investigative journalists, we will find out whether it's real or not. But those shiny objects are being thrown at you. You've been part of these negotiations. They are delicate. They require consensus as we talk through it. What does the moment as we stand now tell us about how the next 10 days are going to play out? Before we do hopefully get a fossil fuel phase out agreed on?
Al Gore 30:46
Well, let's talk about some of what you describe as progress. An example you used was the loss and damage fund. I'm in favor of establishing the loss and damage fund. It was really essentially adopted last year at Sharm el Sheikh, so it's pulled out again to recycle the appearance of victory. So does that make it a huge victory or a bright, shiny object that distracts us from job number one? Job number one is to phase out fossil fuels. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. And all of the time that we spend talking about something other than that is first and foremost a distraction from the moral duty I think this COP has to start phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible. And this whole discussion about unabated fossil fuels, as the Secretary General said in his opening speech, no. Abatement as they describe it, as the technology is now available, may define it is a ruse, really, it's, you know, Oxford University conducted a massive study of the phenomena known as rights law, the cost-reduction curves for technologies and we've seen in our lives some stunning examples: the mobile phones, the flat screen TVs, not to mention computer chips. And so they studied all of them, and some go down in cost very rapidly, some a bit slowly. They have a very small category labeled non-improving technologies. That's the category that carbon capture and sequestration is in. For 50 years, there has been zero reduction in cost for carbon capture and sequestration, so any expectation of a magical breakthrough that brings the cost down, while not impossible, we've seen some surprising things in our lives, but it's not likely.
Akshat Rathi 32:50
The president of COP has been the CEO of an oil company from the day he was announced as the COP president. There's been plenty of pushback from civil society, some from politicians, but none from the very diplomats who have to work with him to try and get a deal. First, why was there not pushback from the diplomats? And second, where does that leave us for getting a fossil fuel phase out in the final communiqué?
Al Gore 33:16
Well, first of all, there was pushback. I mean, I objected to it immediately. And 130 elected officials, primarily from Europe, and the United States, drafted and signed a very powerful letter objecting to it. But the process by which the leadership of these COPs is selected is itself in need of reform. It rotates between the different regions of the world as they're defined by the United Nations. And then there is a kind of competition between countries in the region whose turn it is. The Republic of Korea was the competition for the UAE. A lot of deals were made between the UAE and Korea, you aware of that?
Akshat Rathi 34:04
I am not.
Al Gore 34:05
Oh, you might look at the massive oil storage facility placed by the UAE in South Korea. Getting millions of barrels giving them first purchase. You might look at the massive investment fund established by the UAE in South Korea, you might look at the military training relationships that were established. And I really, truly do not know for a fact that all of those deals and all of that money had anything to do with Korea’s surprising decision to withdraw from the competition and leave the UAE as the only candidate. I do not know that. I do suspect that. The petrostates, and they're not the only ones, but the petrostates play these games at a very high level. Look at the World Cup for football. Why is it that the day the surprising change in the regional rotation was announced, only one country was prepared with a bid, no one else knew it was coming in time, similar shenanigans take place in the selection of who's going to host these COPs. And once the country is selected, then that country has the authority to name the president of the COP. I believe that the UN Secretary General should share the authority for naming the COP. Now the Secretary General doesn't want that authority. And I'm sympathetic with his desire not to be involved with it. But I think we have to change this process. It's just not fit for fit for purpose. We're now struggling, we don't know where the next COP is going to be because another petrostate, Russia, has objected to country after country in Eastern Europe. Maybe Serbia will emerge as an acceptable host. And then after that is Brazil, which is on side, and then perhaps Australia, I think that's the favored candidate with the Pacific island nations.
Akshat Rathi 36:05
We're going into a period, which is now less than 12 months when President Biden is likely to re run for election, probably against Donald Trump. And politics goes here and there. You have experience of that. But we also have finite time, shrinking time. If you don't get Joe Biden re-elected, if you don't have a democratic presidency, there is likely going to be backsliding on climate, probably pretty disastrous backsliding. What is it in the next 12 months that you think the Democratic Party and President Biden needs to do to ensure that he gets reelected?
Al Gore 36:48
Yeah, well, I think that I should start by telling you that I am a strong supporter of Joe Biden. And I think that by any objective assessment, he's done a really good job as president. But if you look at the pandemic, and the reorganization of supply chains, that's lasted a long time in the wake of the pandemic. And the inflation that resulted, inflation has come down dramatically, but the political perception of inflation has a very long tail. And I think that is one of the major reasons why he's not showing up as well as people like me would like and the public opinion polls. It's also important to say that a year away from the election, there have been many incumbent presidents who were in this kind of political shape in the polling and a year later won reelection. But I'm not going to dodge your question, Akshat, it is a definite prospect that this election might not turn out as most of us would like like it to and what we should do in the meantime, those of us like myself, who have at least one foot in the political arena needs to pull out all the stops and help Joe Biden get reelected.
Akshat Rathi 38:02
One of the initiatives you work on is Climate TRACE, it gives you information now much more granular on who are the people producing CO2 emissions? You've got satellite-managed measurement, which means not many people can hide from this. But you're also one who has said that facts alone don't change people. So how do you square the circle that, yes, we do need more transparency. We need more data to make better decisions or convince more people about it. And yet if facts alone aren't going to convince people, why do we pursue the path of getting more and more data to try and get people…
Al Gore 38:44
Well, let's put this in perspective. Why would a company go to the Climate TRACE database in search of a lower-carbon-emitting supplier in their supply chain, not simply because the facts are there, but it's important that the facts are there, when they get pressure from their consumers, from their employees, from their executives from the families of the executives, from people all over the world, who are increasingly aware that we're in grave danger unless we sharply reduce carbon emissions. So it's the combination of public, social, and economic pressure to get with the program and start being part of the solution to the climate crisis that makes these facts from Climate TRACE valuable because the incentive to use the facts is present because of activists. And this is now the largest social movement in the history of the world. There are young people and people of all ages in every nation in the world, some of the dictatorships like North Korea, you don't see them as much. But even there, I can tell you why I know that, everywhere in the world, there is rising pressure. We as human beings, have many limitations, many weaknesses, many legacies of our long period of evolutionary development, we respond to the threats that our ancient ancestors survived using our neocortex and our reasoning capacity to communicate with one another about more complex challenges and finding the solution. So that takes time. But we have the capacity to rise above our limitations. And you know how I know that? We've done it in the past. When the anti-apartheid movement was successful, the civil rights movement in my country, giving women the right to vote, educating women didn't used to be possible, now, 65% of the college graduates in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are women. These social movements all have one thing in common: after the distractions are cleared away, and the central choice is revealed as a choice between what's right and what's wrong. Then at a very deep level, the outcome becomes foreordained because of who we are in our deepest core. And this climate crisis is now presenting us with an approaching political tipping point where, I'm convinced, we will have enough of a global consensus to take action.
Akshat Rathi 41:37
Now this has been a tremendous conversation, we've talked about a number of subjects, anything to do with climate, given how many things it touches, we have to have a wide-ranging conversation. But I want to bring us to a close, you speak to lots of people who are in power in places who can make real change happen. When you think about what we need to do, in the urgency that we have, what is in your mind the heuristic, which order of things would you bring up with somebody that this 1,2, 3, are the things if we do them, we get this thing going faster than we really need to right now.
Al Gore 42:16
We're using the sky as an open sewer. And our reckless spewing of heat trapping pollution into the sky is now causing these climate-related, horrific disasters to be worse and worse and more intense and more frequent. And everybody knows it. If you want to change that, if you want to say to our young people, ‘You don't have to be depressed about the future, you don't have to have a dark outlook.’ We have a mental health crisis around the world now, partly because young people are losing hope. We need to restore hope. We need to prove that we have the capacity as human beings to save our future. And I always say that if you have any doubt that we as human beings have the political will necessary to save ourselves. Please remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.
Akshat Rathi 43:14
Thank you, Vice President.
Al Gore 43:15
Thank you Akshat.
Akshat Rathi 43:23
Thank you for listening to Zero. Apart from this podcast, every day at COP, we publish the Bloomberg Green newsletter, full of all the latest at the summit. Sign up for free at bloomberg.com, there’s a link in the show notes. Also, you can now listen to Zero without ads, just log into Apple Podcasts using your Bloomberg Subscription. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate or review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who enjoys inconvenient truths. You can get in touch at [email protected]. Zero’s producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Meg Szabo and Abby Danzig. I'm Akshat Rathi, back next week.