Two decades after the release of his groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has admitted he was surprised by the ferocious, ongoing backlash from the fossil fuel industry and its political allies. But the former US vice-president insists he still has optimism the world will confront the climate crisis.
At a New York event to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of the film and his subsequent climate advocacy work, Gore, now 78, joked: “I always say if it hadn’t been for me, we might have a big problem right now” when asked about the progress made over the past two decades.
“The scientists unfortunately have been proven to be absolutely correct,” Gore said on Wednesday. “In some important ways, they may have even understated what the damage is doing. The resistance has been more durable and sustained than I expected it to be.”
The fossil fuel industry has “captured control of too many governments” and even the UN’s top climate science apparatus “to a shocking degree”, Gore said, citing recent reporting by the Guardian that Saudi oil operatives were involved in crafting high-profile UN climate reports.
An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006, documents a slideshow talk that Gore repeatedly showed to audiences around the world on the mounting climate crisis after he lost the 2000 US presidential election.
In the wake of the landmark film, Gore started a grassroots movement to train new climate activists, with his Climate Reality Project amassing a network of 4.5 million people across 196 countries.
The past two decades have also seen barely restrained global heating, which has caused effects that are “growing so rapidly, and they are becoming more and more frequent”, as Gore pointed out, citing record heatwaves that wracked numerous countries this summer and the recent disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border that was triggered by a collapsing glacier.
The current rate of temperature rise is set to breach internationally agreed thresholds and is set to cause “utter devastation”, Gore warned, adding that looming “tipping points” such as rampant melting of the ice sheets and the Amazon turning into a savanna will push the world towards catastrophe.
Gore told the event, staged as a conversation with Al Roker, the TV weather forecaster, as part of climate week, that he saw his long battle to rally action on the climate crisis as a continuation of previous struggles such as the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s rights.
“And in all those previous cases, some of the advocates felt despair, and the biographies and diaries are filled with those kinds of expressions,” he said.
“But they kept going anyway because, as others have said, courage is not the absence of fear or despair. It’s the decision to go forward in spite of it. And I really strongly believe that we are very close to that positive tipping point where the mass of public opinion is going to be unstoppable.”
While the world is still barreling toward a dangerous global temperature rise of beyond 2C hotter than the pre-industrial average, the speedy deployment of clean energy has helped ensure that previous, disastrous projections of a 4C or more temperature rise by the end of the century are now considered unlikely.
Gore said that while many developing countries still struggle to get adequate financing for renewables and battery projects, he is confident that the mass adoption of clean energy, now routinely cheaper than fossil fuels such as coal and gas, will take hold.
“The day is coming when our momentum will overtake the resistance. We’re getting very close now,” he said. “I think we are going to win this. The remaining question is whether we will win it in time to avoid those negative tipping points I talked about.”
Gore’s comments came shortly before a headline UN climate event hosted by António Guterres, the outgoing UN secretary general and vocal proponent of climate action.
Guterres lamented ongoing expansion of fossil fuels that is “defying science, economics and common sense”. He added: “We have seen how fossil fuel dependence wreaks havoc – driving up costs, draining budgets, squeezing households and leaving countries at the mercy of conflicts and decisions far beyond their borders.”
But the secretary general said that countries are now able to take a different path by tripling renewable adoption, reducing deforestation and electrifying their economies.
“Renewables are the cheapest, fastest and most secure source of new electricity almost everywhere,” he said. “Clean energy has gone from alternative to unstoppable.”
