The New Yorker Radio Hour - Al Gore on the Climate Crisis: “We Have a Switch We Can Flip”

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Despite months of discouraging news about extreme weather conditions, the former vice-president Al Gore still believes that there is a solution to the climate crisis clearly in sight. “We have a switch we can flip,” he tells David Remnick. The problem, as Gore sees it, is that a powerful legacy network of political and financial spheres of influence are stubbornly standing in the way. “When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, ‘Oh, let’s go down to the store and buy some motor oil.’ The purpose is to condition the political space so that they have a continued license to keep producing and selling more and more fossil fuels,” Gore says. But it’s also what he describes as our ongoing “democracy crisis” that’s playing a factor as well. He believes lawmakers who know better are turning a blind eye to incontrovertible data for short-term political gain. “The average congressman spends an average of five hours a day on the telephone, and at cocktail parties and dinners begging lobbyists for money to finance their campaigns,” Gore says. Still, Gore says he is cautiously optimistic. “What Joe Biden did last year in passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act . . . was the most extraordinary legislative achievement of any head of state of any country in history,” Gore says, adding that temperatures will stop going up “almost immediately” if we reach a true net zero in fossil-fuel emissions. “Half of all the human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as twenty-five to thirty years.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It would honestly be hard to overstate the role that Al Gore has played in making us aware of the climate crisis. And in making it seem vivid, making it seem real. When he was elected vice president in 1992, Gore was one of the only national politicians who really put climate change at the top of the agenda. Though the right wing tried to stereotype him as a tree-hugging hippie, Gore was firmly in the establishment, a former senator from a political family in Tennessee. Gore had about him a wooden earnestness that occasionally made him the butt of jokes on Saturday Night Live and the like.

But by the time the film in Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, a film that documented his long effort to gain support for climate action. The jokes had really faded. Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his efforts, and he founded an investment firm dedicated to sustainability. And now after the hottest summer in recorded history, his quest seems more urgent than ever. The UN's annual conference on climate change begins next month. So I wanted to talk to Al Gore about how far we've come in the fight against climate change and how far we still have to go. Great.

David, how are you? Nice to see you. Well, here we are the last time I saw you. You came to the New Yorker in Condi and asked to talk about climate. This was probably 10 years ago. And you were in the mode of warning, pushing, just as you had even years before with an inconvenient truth. And now we're through the summer of 2023

when I think anybody has to recognize that this is not a matter of the future. this is a matter of now, the climate crisis and now, we're living in it. How do you assess what you saw, what we all saw in the summer all across the world? Well, as you say, it now seems obvious to almost everyone that the severity of the crisis has reached a new level of intensity with the climate-related extreme events becoming so common. 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.

Describe what this switch is and what the political means are, and what stands in the way of flipping the switch? The climate crisis is really a fossil fuel crisis. There are other components of it for sure, but 80% of it is the burning of fossil fuels, and 80% of the energy powering the world economy is, still coming from fossil fuels. So it's no easy task to unwind that. But here's what the metaphor of the switch is based on. The 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, the temperatures on Earth will stop going up almost immediately, like flipping a switch. The lag time is as little as three.

three to five years. They used to think it would keep on going because of positive feedback loops, and some things tragically will. The melting of the ice, for example, has been triggered and will continue, though we can moderate the pace of that. The extinction crisis will continue without other major changes. But we can stop temperatures going up, but almost immediately. That's the switch we need to flip. And then we can start the long and slow healing process almost immediately if we act. What's required? We have to find a way to shift out of our dependence on fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas. And of course, the fossil fuel industry for more than 100 years built up a legacy network of political and economic influence, lobbying and campaign contributions and

the revolving door phenomena where fossil fuel executives go into the government. I mean, the last president made the CEO of ExxonMobil, the Secretary of State. It's almost hard to believe. But that is a symbol of how they have penetrated governments around the world. world. When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, oh, let's go down to the store and buy some motor oil. The purpose is to condition the political space so that they have a continued license to keep producing and selling more and more fossil fuels. Well, you're not only an evangelist for climate change. You also are a politician, a seasoned

politician. I'm a recovering politician. You're looking better already. Tell me why. Why is it impossible for politicians not to run on this successfully? What do you counsel politicians and why is it so hard? It's so hard because the polluters have gained such a degree of control over the processes of self-government. I've often said that in order to solve the climate crisis, we have to pay a lot of attention to the democracy crisis. Our representative democracy is not working very well. You know, when I first went into the Congress in the mid-70s, I never even had a fundraiser. Now the average congressman spends at least an average of five hours a day on the telephone and at cocktail parties and dinners begging lobbyists for money to finance their campaigns.

It seems to me that until alternative energy sources are cheap enough and ubiquitous enough to overcome the price and ubiquity of fossil fuels, you're always going to have a problem. Bill McKibben will argue, as you do, I think, that those sources of energy are around, and no matter what you may think of Elon Musk as a matter of character, that – electric cars are on their way. Which stage are we in? Are we, and you're involved in the investment end of things as well. How far away are we from, in technological terms and financial terms, of being able to overwhelm fossil fuels? Well, we're getting closer and closer. Globally, 88% of all the new electricity generation last year was from renewables, 80% from solar and wind.

more money is now going into renewables than to fossil fuels, but the base of fossil fuel generation is so large it continues. That's the number one market for fossil fuels, electricity generation. The second one is the one you touched upon with electric vehicles, and yes, Elon must single-handedly advance the distribution of electric vehicles by 15, 20 years, really quite a remarkable story. You give him a lot of credit. Oh, of course. Are you troubled by Elon Musk as a tribune for the cause? Well, sure, sure. I mean, I have known him for a long time.

And like some other of his longtime friends, I have been puzzled and concerned by the U-turn he's taken on some very fundamental issues. But back to the narrative you've explored here, all of the big auto companies have long since shifted their R&D budgets and their focus to trying to compete in the electric vehicle space. It will be a bumpy transition, but it's well underway. So how do you do that from the White House, from Congress? What do you want to see Joe Biden do? And can he do it? Does he have the political and rhetorical capacity to do it effectively the way you want to see. 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 in any country in history. However, we are still permitting fossil fuel production on public lands. We can't control private lands. We could bring it to a halt on public lands. What would be the political cost for him doing that? It's significant. And it can't be blinked away because, again, the influence of the fossil fuel industry is quite significant. 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. Now, the economists to a person will say that a carbon price is essential, whether in the form of a tax or a fee or whatever, but it's seen as a political death. I have the scars to prove it. I succeeded in January of 1993 persuading the incoming Clinton Gore administration to put a carbon tax in. our first budget proposal. And it passed the House of Representatives and then was killed in the Senate. A decade and more later, Barack Obama succeeded in getting a so-called cap and trade, which is an indirect price on carbon, passed by the House. And again, it died in the Senate.

I think we're close to seeing a carbon tax. Look at the African Climate Summit, the first ever, the leaders in Africa said, we've got to have a carbon tax. And we need to devote the the money to helping developing countries gain access to private capital markets so they can participate in this clean energy revolution. They've been walled off from it. I'm speaking today with Al Gore Jr., former vice president, and a pioneering advocate for climate action. We'll continue in a moment. I'm speaking with former vice president Al Gore. Next month, nearly 200 countries will join the UN's annual climate conference, a meeting that's known as COP, Conference of the Parties.

and the members will assess how the globe is doing on the goal of the Paris Agreement to keep temperature rise this century below two degrees Celsius. Yet another climate summit is coming up this time in the Middle East. Yeah. It seems odd who's leading it. How do you feel about that? They have named the head of their national oil company, Sultan al-Jabir, as president of the conference. I think it's... What does that pretend?

Well, I think that it takes off a disguise that has masked the reality for quite some time. It's absurd to put the CEO of one of the largest and by many measures least responsible oil and gas companies in the world in charge of the climate conference. In Glasgow, the fossil fuel delegates outnumbered the largest national delegation. They have dominated this UN process the same way they've dominated so many state governments in the U.S. and the national government much of the time. And it goes back to the weakness of the United Nations as an institution. It has been that way since its creation. It's the best we've got, so we have to make the best of it. COP 1, the first of these annual conferences, took place three years after the Earth summit in Berlin.

The young Environment Minister of Germany, Angela Merkel, was the president of COP 1. First order of business was to adopt the rules, including the rules for how the world's going to make decisions. What are the voting rules? Saudi Arabia objected. The U.S. coal industry helped organize opposition, among others. their chief lobbyists at that time, Don Perlman, worked hand-in-glove with the Saudi-Arabian government. So the rules were not adopted. The default to procedure was something called consensus, which is the same as unanimity unless the president of the cop recognizes someone who is trying to object. If some Pacific Island nation like Vanuatu is in the back of the vast hall waving his hand, they may not see him.

If Saudi Arabia is waving both arms in the front row, then they say, oh, sorry, we don't have permission from this petro state to act. And so the petro states, and in effect the fossil fuel industry, has had a veto over anything the world community tries to do on fossil fuels. Even the Great Paris Agreement, which was a genuine achievement, could not use the phrase fossil fuels. And last year, there was a movement by the European Union and others to have a resolution to phase out fossil fuels, to begin the phase out. Saudi Arabia said, no, I'm sorry. We won't permit that. You have to have our permission, and we will not grant you our permission.

Sorry, world, we can't even talk about fossil fuels. It's insane. It's utterly insane. Now, we can change those rules. I've spent a lot of time with the international lawyers, who understand all this, three quarters of the nations could vote to change the rules and give a supermajority the political power to adopt binding resolutions. It's a tough challenge for sure, but we have to do it, and we have to find a way to do it. Even if a super majority of the nations gained the ability to pass binding resolutions, they're not really binding if nations like Russia or Saudi Arabia or the U.S. want to just ignore them. But we can establish the so-called direction of travel. We can establish a new and strong consensus in the world that in order

to save humanity's future, we have to phase out fossil fuels. I'm not saying it's easy. It's not easy. It's the toughest thing humanity has ever tried to do. You live in a most of the time or some of the time in a bluish city in a red state. You live in Nashville and Tennessee, obviously. Have you made inroads politically to your ear since you've started campaigning on this issue so many years ago in a place like Tennessee? Oh, sure. Yeah. How can you quantify it? Well, the young Republicans are aghast at their elders' troglodytic positions on climate. Nashville, by the way, just elected a very progressive, highly intelligent mayor. But there's no doubt that the state legislature reflecting the politics of the state as a whole is still in the hip pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

But out in the countryside, out in the 95 counties of Tennessee, people are coming around on this, of course. farmers have seen these incredibly devastating weather events disrupt planning, disrupt harvesting. Small towns have been destroyed. Waverly, Tennessee, west of Nashville had one of these rain bombs. I can go through the list. It's all over the country, all over the world now, and it is beginning to wake people up. Reality has its effect. Reality eventually has its effect. But we're in a race against time. And, you know, aren't we losing that race miserably? I would define it in different terms. Yes, we are.

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. Is that your natural optimism speaking or is it or is it the facts? They back you up. Well, I am temperamentally optimistic. Because if I ask Elizabeth Colbert that I, you know, I get quite a different answer. She does everything she can to prevent despair, which is the unforgivable sin, but it creeps in.

Well, the old cliche denial ain't just a river in Egypt should be joined by despairing just a tire in the trunk. Despair is just another form of climate denial. We don't have time for it. Just look at the climate migrants. You know, there's so many examples of this already. People from Central America coming through Mexico to the southern border of the U.S., that's driven by climate. The Lancet Commission, widely respected, says in this century we may have one billion climate migrants crossing international borders. That could threaten our capacity for self-governance. There are obstacles to move out of the way. Well, you mentioned democracy early on. It is well known, at least to people of a certain age, that after challenging the results in 2000, you painfully, elegantly, and with grace, conceded.

You stepped away. and George Bush became president. We saw what we saw in January, January 6th, and now we face the possibility of that possibly being a permanent condition, something that can happen over and over again, the way we're now seeing impeachment as a kind of political weapon being used in the Republican House. You were prescient about the environmental crisis.

Did the crisis of democracy take you by surprise? No. Well, I wrote a book called The Assault on Reason in 2007. It began with a notation that many Americans were asking the question, what has happened to America. It has been building for quite some time. But I think that the love people have for freedom, for self-determination, and for self-government is really. reawakening, and people are... You think it'll prevail. I do. Again, I'm temperamentally optimistic. We don't have time to wallow in despair. We've got work to do.

And the stakes have never been higher. It relies upon the willingness of the American people to wake up and fight to save our democracy and to save the future of humanity. This all sounds so dire, but it is. necessary. Vice President Al Gore, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Former Vice President Al Gore is now the chairman and founder of the Climate Reality Project. He shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The United Nations COP28 conference begins in November. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. And I hope you'll join us next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music, was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gophon and Putabwele. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decker. And a special thanks this week to Alana Casanova Burgess. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in. part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.