We'll stop climate change, but 'how soon' is the life-and-death question - Al Gore

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Al Gore, Al Gore: Chairman and Co-founder, Generation Investment Management: We have agency. We have the ability to solve this crisis. If we can simply muster sufficient political will to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week, Al Gore. How does the former US vice president and climate campaigner feel about Donald Trump pulling out of the Paris climate deal?

Al Gore: Well, a lot of the decisions that affect global warming pollution emissions are not down to what the federal government in the US does.

Robin Pomeroy: Al Gore says the rapid rise in green technologies means the business case is now too compelling to reverse progress on climate change.

Al Gore: I think the the die is cast. The writing is on the wall. We're going to make this transition and we're going to solve the climate crisis. The remaining question, however, is how quickly will we do it?

Robin Pomeroy: But will that bold optimism reduce the sense of urgency?

Al Gore: Mother Nature is providing a good bit of urgency when people suffer these terrible consequences. There's another reason why this is an urgent priority, and that is it creates three times as many good new jobs.

Robin Pomeroy: Follow Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister programmes, Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this interview with Al Gore on why the pendulum will not swing back away from global climate action

Al Gore: Millions of new jobs, cleaning up the air, improving health outcomes, and saving the future of humanity, that's a pretty good deal.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

Climate change and extreme weather events are identified in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report as the top challenges facing the world in the medium and long terms. That report was published in early January, just before the Annual Meeting in Davos - you can hear or watch the Radio Davos episode that looks at the main findings.

But that’s not the only reason it seemed like the right moment to catch up with Al Gore in Davos.

A quarter of a century ago, the then US vice president, a Democrat, lost his presidential race against the Republican candidate George W Bush, who promptly pulled the US out of the global pact on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol. In 2025, Donald Trump has done the same, this time with the Paris Treaty - a move popular with voters who either reject the science about climate change or think that the UN-backed process is unfair on America.

I wanted to ask Al Gore whether he thought history was repeating itself.

Also, as you will hear him mention during our conversation, we were speaking as wildfires were destroying parts of Los Angeles, and as data revealed that average global temperatures last year were, for the first time, 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than in pre-industrial times. I started by asking Al Gore about that.

Robin Pomeroy: 2024 was the hottest year on record, 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels. Everyone knows 1.5 from the Paris Treaty. We weren't meant to get beyond that. Where do we go from here if we are already at 1.55?

Al Gore: Well, first of all, the way the climate science community speaks about the 1.5 degree threshold is not in terms of crossing it for a temporary period or even a few years. It has to stay above for ten years before it has meaning for the climate models, the way they interpret it. But it's not a good sign that we crossed it at all.

And of course, this was the second year in a row that we had a record high temperature. And both of the last two years, the amount by which we increased the Earth's temperature was unusually large. And the hottest ten years ever measured have been the last ten. So the pattern is extremely clear. And we really have to take on board the significance of this.

Now we can reduce the Earth's temperature. And a lot of people are not aware that that is one of our options. If we get to true net zero, no net additions to the overburden of the heat trapping pollution, temperatures will stop going up almost immediately. The lag is a little as little as 3 to 5 years.

And if we can stay at true net zero for a quarter century or more, then as much as half of the human-caused CO2 in the atmosphere will fall back out of the atmosphere over time. And if we do true net zero with methane as well as CO2 and the other greenhouse gases, then the temperatures will start going down again.

We have agency. We have the ability to solve this crisis. If we can simply muster sufficient political will to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels. Climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. 80% of the emissions come from burning fossil fuels. And we now have alternatives that are cheaper, cleaner, more job creating, better in every way. So we just have to overcome the political power of the most powerful business lobby in the history of the world, the fossil fuel lobby.

Robin Pomeroy: And in the week of Davos, on Day 1, we saw the inauguration of Donald Trump 2.0. You're not a neutral player in this, you were a Democratic presidential candidate. But purely on the climate issue, he's pinned his colours to the mast quite clearly. He's says he's pulling out the Paris Treaty, just as a previous president pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol. I go back that far. I joined you on this adventure at COP6, if you remember that one.

Al Gore: Yes, I do.

Robin Pomeroy: I'd like to get your kind of historic perspective on that, because at the time, the pendulum was swinging, the political pendulum was like, well, that's kind of done and dusted now. But it did carry on, didn't it? You know, there were lots of bumps along the way, but we ended up - way too late, perhaps, with the Paris Treaty - but one election cycle doesn't necessarily change the trajectory.

I'm just wondering how you're feeling this week when history in some ways is repeating itself.

Al Gore: Well, a lot of the decisions that affect global warming pollution emissions are not down to what the federal government in the US does. He can declare a phoney energy emergency in order to try to sidestep the climate emergency, which is real. But governors and mayors and business leaders are, for the most part, going to continue reducing their emissions because it makes good economic sense. And it's also very important to to recruit and retain the best and brightest employees in their workforce. Young people in particular nowadays often don't want to work for a company that doesn't share their values, especially on an issue as important as the climate crisis, which has an impact on the future of human civilization.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you think the momentum with things like clean energy and various other technologies is already unstoppable?

Al Gore: I think it is unstoppable.

The fossil fuel sector has three main markets. The first is electricity generation, where they burn primarily coal and gas. The second is mobility or transportation. The liquid fuels for cars, trucks, planes and ships. And the third market is petrochemicals, 75% of which is plastics.

They are losing the first two markets. The first they're losing fairly rapidly because the last year, if you look at all the new electricity generation installed worldwide, 87% was renewable and it's on the way to 90-95%.

The second market, transportation. We've seen electric vehicles gain market share. They're still gaining market share. The momentum may have slowed slightly in the last year, but it's still increasing dramatically.

The third, petrochemical market, you know, people around the world are fed up with the pollution of plastic into the oceans and the rivers and the landscapes. The health consequences of these microplastics are beginning to cause a great deal of concern to physicians and to average people.

So I think the the die is cast. The writing is on the wall. We're going to make this transition and we're going to solve the climate crisis. The remaining question, however, is how quickly will we do it?

And the fossil fuel companies, which as I've said, have the most powerful lobby in history, are trying to slow down this transition. And they finance a lot of climate deniers that put false information out. And but they're losing their ability to dominate there. Unfortunately, they're way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. And they have a lot of politicians that do whatever they tell them to do. But young people are entering the ranks of those who vote in elections. And we're seeing the beginnings of a real change in the political systems approach to this crisis also.

Robin Pomeroy: Are you surprised to come up against climate denial? Back all those years ago. COP6. It was still denied. It's not happening or it's not happening because of human activity. You see today all those predictions have come true.

Al Gore: Of course, yes. I wish the scientists whose findings I reported in books and movies, I wish they had been wrong, but they unfortunately they've been absolutely right.

And the fact that they have been spot on should lead us to pay even more careful attention to what they're warning would happen in the immediate future if we don't start phasing out fossil fuels and reducing climate emissions.

I think that the climate deniers have lost the argument clearly. They lost it a long time ago. But the fact that they've lost it is now more apparent to people, that climate related extreme events are really quite extraordinary and they happen every day now. I mean, every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. And we saw I mean, today, as we do this interview, Los Angeles is on fire again. Valencia in Spain, Katmandu and Nepal and Nigeria. The climate related disasters all over the world are becoming far more frequent and far more serious and deadly. And Mother Nature is a far better advocate than I am or that any of the climate activists are. And these events are really persuading people.

Robin Pomeroy: Climate Trace. You gave this presentation. The images you have behind you of a globe with these kind of things pointing out.

Al Gore: The Spiky Globe.

Robin Pomeroy: The Spiky Globe. Tell us what is Climate Trace.

Al Gore: Well, there's an old saying in business that you can only manage what you can measure. And before Climate Trace was founded and put into place, we were not able to measure where it's all coming from.

We knew the basics. It's coming from burning fossil fuels and different sectors. Agriculture plays a role and I won't go through the list. But we did not have with great precision exactly where it's all coming from.

Now we do. This is a coalition of 13 artificial intelligence organizations combined with 160 data contributors, some of the greatest scientists in the world who have combined their efforts to precisely identify the 660 million sources of the global warming pollution everywhere in the world. We have every nation, every state or province, every county, the 9,000 largest cities in the world, every sector and subsector of the economy. And we can show you very precisely where it's coming from.

And starting in March, we will accelerate our reporting from annual to monthly reports. Every month, every company in the world will have its emissions monitored. Scope one, two and three if you keep up with that taxonomy.

And my partners in this coalition work hard. It's a volunteer organization. It's fantastic the work that they have been able to compile. And we can now show you every place in the world where it's coming from.

And we've added the particulate pollution because, you know, when you burn fossil fuels, you simultaneously create pollution and coal pollution, the greenhouse gases that are invisible, tasteless and odorless, but trap heat, and also the particulate pollution that kills 8.7 million people per year around the world.

And the alliance between the health community, the environmental justice community and the climate community will be a very powerful alliance to accelerate the the sharp reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Robin Pomeroy: Can you explain to the non-expert how you can detect those?

Al Gore: Yes, sure.

Robin Pomeroy: Years ago it was an estimate, very often, wasn't it? How much fossil fuel you're burning. You do a little sum, work out how much carbon dioxide will be coming out, but it was never exact. And there are many other gases which are greenhouse gases.

Al Gore: Yes. It's it's never been possible before. Artificial intelligence has made this possible. If you're trying, just to give you an example, we get data constantly, every day, every hour from 300 satellites orbiting the earth and 30,000 ground truthing sensors, land, sea and air based, which enables the coalition to fuze together data from a lot of different sources about each individual site.

If you're trying to measure CO2 just by using satellite images, you can't do it because you're looking down through a column of air at the Earth's surface that's already so enriched with CO2 that the so-called signal to noise ratio is very unfavorable. And you're looking at targets that are often surrounded by highways or other emitters of CO2.

But with artificial intelligence, we can combine the infrared imagery with the visual light imagery, with the ripples of water in the cooling ponds, with the speed of the fan blades and the cooling machinery, with the offtake data for what they're selling or providing that we can find on the internet. And then by fusing all that data together we can get a very accurate way to put it into the machine learning algorithms that get better and better with each observation.

And some CEOs around the world are privately giving us their own self-monitoring data because they want to know how to reduce their emissions. And we use that to check the accuracy of what we're doing. And these machine learning algorithms constantly get more and more accurate. So AI makes it possible to measure it all.

Robin Pomeroy: And have you been surprised by some of those things? One of the things in your presentation was methane from landfills. Not something the average person often thinks about

Al Gore: Yes. If you just look at all the land, we have virtually all of the significant landfills around the world, in every country. And the methane emissions from and if you use the phrase CO2 equivalent, which has CO2 and methane and nitrous oxide and the other gases all together, the greenhouse gas pollution from landfills is four times larger than all of the data centers in the world, 14 times larger than all of the AI data centers around the world. And having that accurate information available side by side makes it possible to develop strategies to reduce emissions at lower cost.

For example, if we look at landfills that are covered and compare them to landfills that are not covered, we can get a 70% reduction in the in the pollution just by covering them with sand or dirt. And there are a variety of ways to do it.

We can use Climate Trace data to identify the 100 most problematic landfills in the world and then organize coalitions to cover those landfills. It's not high tech. It's not at great cost, but it has a tremendous impact on reducing the global warming pollution.

Robin Pomeroy: You mentioned the evidence of climate change. We're seeing fires in California, the floods in Europe, Asia, everywhere. It's with us right now. What is the most urgent action humanity is to take to build resilience, to actually live alongside that global warming, that climate change that we can't actually stop right now?

Al Gore: We have to simultaneously improve the ability of communities everywhere in the world to adapt as much as they can, to come up with measures to keep their citizens safe, as in Los Angeles in these fires, there's more that could be done to protect people. And the same is true of all these climate related disasters.

But at the same time, our top priority must be to also reduce the emissions that are causing this crisis. It can be solved. They used to think that if we got to true net zero, the temperatures will would continue to go up. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, as it's often referred to, has a relatively new finding that's very robust. And they now know that if we get to true net zero, the temperatures will stop going up right away, almost right away, a very short lag time, as I said a few moments ago. And if we stay at true net zero, then as much as half of the human caused global warming pollution will have fallen out of the atmosphere over little more than a quarter century. So and the temperatures will start coming down.

So we can solve it. We have the ability to do it with the new renewable technology and all kinds of other advances that can replace fossil fuels. And at the same time, that means ending that particulate pollution that kills so many millions of people every year directly.

Robin Pomeroy: Isn't there a risk if you're saying, well, we can do it, we will do it? The urgency is gone?

Al Gore: Well, I think, again, Mother Nature is providing a good bit of urgency when people suffer these terrible consequences and the risk we're running is just too high.

There's another reason why this is an urgent priority, and that is it creates three times as many good new jobs as would be created by the same amount of money invested in the old dirty fossil fuel economy. So if you're creating millions of new jobs, cleaning up the air, improving health outcomes, and saving the future of humanity, that's a pretty good deal.

Robin Pomeroy: Let me ask you three final questions. The first one is from my colleague, Linda Lacina, interviewed you before for the Meet the Leader podcast. And she said, how do you focus?

Al Gore: Me personally? You know, that's a question I've never had to answer before.

Robin Pomeroy: I mean it's a noisy environment, more than ever, bombarded with things. People want to talk to you all the time. In the five steps you made to come to the studio. There must be some points in the day where you've just got to really focus in on one thing.

Al Gore: Yeah. Well, I've given thought to that. Not as an abstract matter, but as a survival matter. And, you know, there's a new book about the attention economy by Chris Hayes, a brilliant author that focuses on this question of how do you focus? And because our attention is now a commodity that lots of organizations and advertisers and companies and sellers of this good or service want to command all the time.

Many people just stay looking at their iPhones or personal devices. And often I see a lot of people watching television while they're looking for devices. So I'm thinking back to your original question How do I focus? I frequently just put my device aside, turn the TV off, get some quiet and still place to contemplate, and then focus in for as much time as I need to complete the task at hand. But it's challenging, isn't it, because everybody knows they can contact you at any hour with these personal devices now, and that's a blessing, but also a curse. So you have to manage your time. And I you know, the old saying, you teach what you need to learn. I need to learn how to do that. But I've gotten a little bit better at it.

Robin Pomeroy: The final one is: what should leaders prioritize in 2025?

Al Gore: Solving the climate crisis. We have what some people have referred to with a clunky word, a polycrisis. And what they mean by that word polycrisis is there are multiple crises that are interwoven. The fate of the oceans, the fate of the forests, the biodiversity and extinction crisis, the all of the economic crises, the worries about jobs being eliminated by generative AI. You can add others to the list. And most important, the climate crisis. But we also have a policy solution, if you will.

The most important solution is to phase out the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. It will have solutions to the health crisis. Solutions to the climate crisis. Solutions to the unemployment crisis that many countries fear they're facing. So I think that's the top priority to phase out global warming pollution by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and the other technologies that are now available.

Robin Pomeroy: And this is my last question then. Is there a book we should all be reading in 2025.

Al Gore: If I can find time away from my digital devices? Yes, I'm going to I'm going to finish this book by Chris Hayes on the attention economy.

Robin Pomeroy: Al Gore. Thanks very much for joining us on Radio Davos.

Al Gore: Thank you. May I say one other thing? For those who doubt that we have the political will to solve this crisis, please remember that political will is itself a renewable resource and we are seeing many people now in the process of renewing it.

Robin Pomeroy: Al Gore. Find out more about Climate TRACE at climatetrace.org.

And do listen back to our episode about the Global Risks Report.

Please follow Radio Davos - and our sister podcast, Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues, wherever you get your podcasts and, if you have a moment, please leave u s a rating or review on the app you are using to listen to this.

This episode of Radio Davos was written and presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Studio production was by Taz Kelleher.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.