My thanks to the reader who alerted me to an interview with Gore in The New Yorker.
Gore, who is best known for his work on climate change, was a member of the House and Senate before serving as Bill Clinton’s vice president. He won the popular vote for president in 2000 but lost the electoral vote. He was the subject of the Oscar-winnning 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth,” on the risks of climate change, and has written numerous books on the issue. Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their climate work.
Here are some of Gore's key comments in the interview:
"Climate-related extreme events have become so common and so dangerous that people who wanted to dismiss it are now waking up to the reality that we’re facing. And, of course, the underlying substance is shocking. We’re still using the sky as an open sewer for the heat-trapping, gaseous pollution that we spew into it at the rate of a hundred and sixty-two million tons every single day. And we know how to solve it. We have the means to solve it. I’ve used the metaphor of flipping a switch, and some people have objected to that. But, really, we have a switch we can flip.
"The climate crisis is really a fossil-fuel crisis. There are other components of it, for sure, but eighty per cent of it is the burning of fossil fuels. And scientists now know — and this is a relatively new finding, a very firm understanding — that, once we stop net additions to the overburden of greenhouse gases, once we reach so-called net zero, then temperatures on Earth will stop going up almost immediately. The lag time is as little as three to five years. They used to think that temperatures would keep on worsening because of positive-feedback loops — and some things, tragically, will. The melting of the ice, for example, will continue, though we can moderate the pace of that; the extinction crisis will continue without other major changes. But we can stop temperatures from going up almost immediately, and that’s the switch we need to flip. And then, if we can stay at true net zero, half of all human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution will fall out of the atmosphere in twenty-five to thirty years. So we can start the long and slow healing process almost immediately, if we act.
“We’re getting closer and closer [to overcoming the use of fossil fuels]. I’ll give you one statistic. If you were asked what percentage of the new electricity generation in the most populous country in the world — India — came from solar and wind last year, you might be surprised to hear that the answer was ninety-two per cent. Globally, eighty-eight per cent of all the new electricity generation last year was from renewables — eighty per cent from solar and wind. And yet we are still building more fossil-fuel facilities. There is now more money going into renewables than into fossil fuels, but the base of fossil-fuel generation is so large that it continues.
"What Joe Biden did last year, in passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which is really a climate bill, was the most extraordinary legislative achievement of any head of state and any country in history. However, we are still permitting fossil-fuel production on public lands. What would be the political cost for him of bringing it to a halt on public lands? Significant — and it can’t be blinked away, because of, again, the influence of the fossil-fuel industry. They have taken over one of our two major political parties, lock, stock, and oil barrel. It’s really quite shocking. But, as someone wrote, Mother Nature is staging an intervention, and I think we’re quite close to crossing a political tipping point.
"The crisis is still getting worse, faster than we are implementing the solutions. However, we are gaining momentum, and we’re gaining momentum so rapidly that I’m convinced we will soon be gaining on the crisis itself.”