Al Gore roasts corporations and politicians, comparing their climate crisis promises to ‘New Year’s resolutions’

Al Gore has enjoyed a very successful career, including as a U.S. senator, U.S. Vice President, U.S. presidential nominee, and even Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2007 for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.” This past May, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his lifetime of service.

What continues to elude him, however, is the amount of progress he expected to see by now on the climate crisis, roughly 45 years after he attended his first congressional hearing about fusion. What aggravates him the most, he argues, is that the world is already empowered to fix what’s broken – if only there were the financial and political will to do so.

He’s not without hope. This editor talked with Gore and his business partner Lila Preston on Tuesday morning about a new, annual climate report that their sustainability-focused investment management firm, Generation Investment Management, has issued. The report is really compelling; it’s also less hopeful than last year’s edition, and Gore sounded a little more frustrated than when I talked with him last year.

We’ll have a podcast from that interview later this week. In the meantime, a handful of excerpts from that chat follow below, edited lightly for length.

TC: I  was reading this report last night and I have to say, it seems more stark and less hopeful in some ways than it did a year ago.

AG: That’s intentional framing on our part. We continue to believe that the world is going to solve this crisis, but the remaining question is how quickly can we solve it, because more damage is being done every day and additional risk is being imposed on humanity every day. Following the wording of the final document at the [2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference], there was an effort by all of us to understand the true meaning of the phrase ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels and [that goal was written into international law at the time]. But in the immediate aftermath, some of the principal fossil fuel companies resumed a massive expansion of the exploration and development of yet more fossil fuels, even though the International Energy Agency says that’s unneeded and inconsistent with the energy transition that is so essential. Since then, we have seen some of the financial services firms also backing away from their pledges . . .so  these pledges begin to resemble, at times, New Year’s resolutions: easy to make and hard to follow through on.

So it’s the ‘law,’ but there are no penalties for these fossil fuel companies to continue expanding as they have?

One extremely dangerous risk that they should be taking much more into account is the risk of stranded assets.  Fatih Birol [the head of the International Energy Agency] has highlighted this risk, but old habits die hard, particularly when they are profitable old habits.

As you’ve said before, it’s not just industry, it’s governments, too. The report addresses the growing backlash against climate policies in various parts of the world, including opposition to wind and solar farms. How can governments overcome this? How can they better engage the public in supporting this energy transition?

The efficacy of self government is itself one of the problems that has to be confronted. The fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest, most powerful lobby in the history of the world. They’re way better at capturing politicians than capturing emissions, and they have intentionally slowed down this transition, and governments have been slow to respond. 

There’s good news here as well. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act was a milestone event, and it took some time to get the money out the door and to stand up the various programs [it] authorized, but now we’re beginning to see that have a huge impact. Europe continues to lead. China is continuing its build-out of too much fossil fuel infrastructure. However, from January 1 through the end of July this year, China deployed as much new solar capacity as would be provided by roughly 18 new 1-gigawatt nuclear power plants every month. It’s quite incredible. And even when you adjust for capacity factors and all of that, it’s still the amount of available power to equal more than five new nuclear power plants each month. 

So there’s good news, but we’re still moving too slowly, because we’re still using the sky as an open sewer. We’re still trapping as much extra heat each day as 750,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding on the Earth every day. It really is insane that we are continuing to allow this to happen, and all of us have to step up – all sectors, all industries.

I’m sure you get asked a lot about fusion power, which promises to harness the nuclear action that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. Without much proof, VCs have poured $7.1 billion into a handful of startups in recent years. Are they overly optimistic, or do you think they’re onto something?

Generation has innovated the concept of the time value of carbon, and while it is extremely valuable to have these early-stage investors trying to accelerate the development of fusion and also [small module reactors], even the most optimistic of these investors will tell you in candid moments that it’s going to be quite a long time before it’s likely that we’ll have fusion reactors playing any meaningful role. I hope that we can accelerate that timing. I participated in my first congressional hearing on fusion 45 years ago this year, and the experts at the table told our subcommittee that it was 50 years away, so I’m beginning to get excited now. But all joking aside, while there is genuine progress there, let’s be realistic; it’s going to take some time and we have an immediate challenge, and the time value of carbon tells us that what we really need to do is to cut emissions . . . We need to focus on the immediate solutions now available to this threatening climate crisis by speeding up all efforts to reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Many people are thankful that you and Bill Gates and others of your ilk are keeping climate change and climate solutions at the fore. At the same time, you’ve already enjoyed immensely successful careers; you can afford the slings and arrows that come with advocating for major policy and financial shifts to address climate change. Who are the business leaders and politicians coming up behind you to carry the torch? Do you feel like we’re covered on that front? Are you concerned?

The people who we deal with every day, particularly [at Generation], are incredible. One of the less remarked-upon factors in this transition is that the companies that lead are getting the best and brightest young people out of universities and tech schools, and people of all ages switching careers who want to be a part of this. We meet the most extraordinary entrepreneurs who are just burning with passion to play a meaningful role in helping to solve this crisis. There’s so many examples of it. One business leader in the UK who we have supported very strongly, Greg Jackson with Octopus Energy, is really bringing about significant change in the electricity retail sector. The CEO of H2 Green Steel is another . . . business leader of the future who is doing great work right now. 

LP: For us, we call this basket of leaders system-positive thinkers. They’re really shifting the system entirely. They’re thinking about: how do you redesign supply chains? Companies like [the advanced supply chain planning outfits] o9 Solutions and Altana.ai have that massive ambition, [along with the] recognition that these solutions need to be better and cheaper and will have the consequence of being lower footprint, greener and more sustainable. And that’s the excitement. That’s the opportunity.

I do wish we had more higher-profile system-positive thinkers. Some of the wealthiest people in the world have the world’s attention and [could make a material impact by being] more visibly focused on these same issues. 

AG: We’ve got TechCrunch!