Al Gore on Climate Change and Global Sustainability

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: With so much unknown in Moscow, Putin’s war in Ukraine though has forced the western world to wean itself off Russian oil and gas. The former U.S. Vice President Al Gore is urging world leaders to not use the energy crunch as an excuse. Speaking at the opening of the COP27 Summit, Gore said that we must, “Choose life over death and not make long-term commitments to fossil fuels.” To discuss developments from the conference and new climate initiatives, Al Gore joins Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Vice President Al Gore welcome to the show.

AL GORE, FORMER U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: Great to be with you. Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: You’ve just come back from Egypt where you’re — the U.N. Climate Change Summit COP27. One of the big pieces of news was President Biden sitting down with President Xi and deciding to restart a lot of the talks about climate. We’ve been in a really challenging situation with China over Taiwan trade issues. Do you think we need to recalibrate and look at the bigger issues and maybe perhaps recalibrate that relationship so we can all focus on climate?

GORE: Well, I think climate is an issue that can bring the U.S. and China closer together in their aspirations for the future. You know, China has been hit very hard by the climate crisis. This past summer, they went for 70 days with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, 104 Fahrenheit over a vast swath of the county. And the climate historians noted that there is nothing even minimally comparable in all of world history to that heat wave. They’ve also had these massive downpours or rain bombs and many other impacts. The sea level increases are threatening a huge particularly around Shanghai and around Guangzhou. And so, China has its own self-interest in trying to help the world community solve this crisis. And of course, the U.S. and every other nation do as well. But the conflicts you mentioned actually can be transcended by the work that the two largest emitters, the two largest economies have to do together in order to help the world get out of this mess.

ISAACSON: You’re very famous, of course, of being one of the early pioneers in warning about this with an inconvenient truth. But I also think of you as somebody who’s been a science geek all around, you know. Space, information, super highway, you know. For years, you’ve been that. They seem to tie together with something you announced in Egypt which is climate trace. Tell me what that’s about.

GORE: Oh, thank you for asking. I am super excited about this new development. There is a coalition of 10 independent artificial intelligence groups, data researchers, universities, NGOs, that have come together to use artificial intelligence and machine learning and sensor based on air, land and sea. And internet data streams to accurately identify all of the point source significant emissions of greenhouse gas pollution all over the planet. That has not been possible in the past because even though you can use satellites to look down at methane emissions, you can’t see the whole Earth with the kinds of satellites that measure methane but you can’t see it. With CO2, you’re looking down through a column of air that’s so enriched with CO2 that the so-called signal to noise ratio makes it impossible to just see it chemically. But if you use all the wavelengths and measure the infrared, heat signature, the smoke plumes, the ripples of water in the cooling pond, how many fan blades in the cooling fans are operating, the internet data streams, or the off take of electricity, and other sources of information. You can fit those together into a machine learning algorithm that are incredibly accurate in pinpointing where the pollution is actually coming from, exactly how much is coming from which, and what the trend is overtime. We get them from all the wavelengths from 300 existing satellites, from the U.S., Europe, Brazil, China, India, Germany, and Canada. We see the entire surface multiple times every day. And we can use all of that — those different sources of information to really identify and track the emissions. But now, we can apportion it correctly. We found, for example, that the oil and gas industry has under reported their emissions. Their emissions are actually three times higher than what they have reported to the U.N. And the old saying, you can only manage what you can measure, applies here because most of the emissions come from countries that have pledged to get to net zero by 2050. Here’s how they can do it. We can identify those sites precisely. And for companies that have pledged to get to net zero, we can show them how they can buy the same steel and the same amounts from a supplier that has one tenth of the global warming pollution of a supplier that they might be using now. And there are hundreds, thousands of similar examples.

ISAACSON: So, you could take this data and can you pinpoint it directly, like, to one steel plant —

GORE: Yes.

ISAACSON: — or one oil refinery here in Louisiana, or something and say, this particular plant is doing this much pollution?

GORE: Absolutely. And it’s very, very exciting. We have started with the largest 72,000 plus, the largest emissions sites around the world. By next year, we’ll have millions. And essentially all of them, we won’t have the backyard barbecues. There’s a long tale. But we’ll have 99 percent of the emissions identified where they’re coming from. And not only do we have the specific plant, we can show you the different parts of each plant, the so-called metadata or what the technology is and who owns it. We have ownership data for almost all of them. And we are seeing others send us more information that we’re verifying since the release last week. We’ve been deluge with incredible amounts of new data. And in the nature of machine learning, the more data, the more accurate it becomes. One other point, you can’t — they can’t cheat with this. There’s no way to cheat because they would have to falsify multiple different data sets from multiple domains. It’s absolutely impossible. So, we have accountability, and identification for the very first time.

ISAACSON: Is your goal with climate trace to shame some of the companies and how would that work?

GORE: We’re just providing the facts. We’re not the climate cops. We’re a little bit similar to the neighborhood watch organization, the — our neighborhood is the globe. And if somebody wants to use it to name and shame, we can’t prevent them from that, but I think the highest and best use of this information is to identify the opportunities to easily reduce emissions without hurting productivity or profitability. We can do that right away.

ISAACSON: So, you think you may be able to work with these companies if you’re able to identify it, as opposed to just shaming. That can be a carrot and the stick?

GORE: No question about it. Take steal for example, there are companies that use electric furnaces instead of blast furnaces. If you look at the full spectrum, you’d — and it’s all available on the climatetrace.org website, by the way. You can find the same amount of steel, same quality, same kind, from a supplier whose emissions will be less than one tenth of the emissions that come with a supplier that you may now be using. Most of these manufacturers have excess capacity. They can serve more customers with lower emissions. And the ones that lose customers with high emissions will be challenged to, not necessarily name and shame, but challenged to change their technology and change their business model?

ISAACSON: I think you’ve made a deal with one of the government entities in Mexico, for example. Tell me about that.

GORE: Well, there are two — there are actually two cities in Mexico, one in the western cape region of South Africa, two in Europe. Six overall. And we have cut it off at six because we were focused on the launch at the United Nations conference in Egypt. And we decided to sign up six subnational governments as a kind of trial run. They love it. They are basing policy on it. But we are going to open it up in the new year to any municipal government, state, provincial, regional government, and any nation state that asks for our help. We’ll do it all for free and we will assist them in identifying exactly where they can reduce emissions.

ISAACSON: You spoke of the World Bank as being a part of a fossil fuel colonialism. What does that mean and what do you think the World Bank should do?

GORE: Well, the World Bank and the other multilateral development banks that are part of that system, what it’s supposed to do is to open up access for developing countries to the private capital markets. At present, if you are in Nigeria, and you want to build a new solar farm, it makes imminent economic sense, it’s going to be profitable, the cheapest source of electricity. But you will have to pay an interest rate paid in the developed countries. In the U.S., Europe, OECD. Why? Because they have political rifts, rule of law risk, corruption risk, climate risk. Several other layers of risk in these developing countries that the private markets are leery off. The role of the World Bank is supposed to be to take those top layers of risk off the top so that these countries can compete for interest rates that are competitive. So, that they can move forward in their economies. But instead, the World Bank has not been doing its job. They’ve actually been supporting more fossil fuels. And it’s nuts. The person who — the previous presidents appointed to run the World Bank is a climate denier. He ran for Congress as a climate denier. He has a long history of statements. He is now saying oh, no, I’m not. Well, OK. But we need new leadership.

ISAACSON: Is Biden able to change the president of the World Bank and push it, and should he? And who should he appoint?

GORE: Yes. He should push it. The World Bank — the head of the World Bank is a position that has traditionally been filled by the U.S. That is an informal agreement, since World War II, and every administration has been reluctant to lose that privilege. And so, they are reluctant to change course — to change heads in the middle of a term, but nothing could jeopardize the U.S. hold on that position more than having climate denial policies in the World Bank. The votes of the shareholders are necessary, and the U.S. can’t do it unilaterally, but Germany has come out in favor of changing the World Bank head, the Australia has as well, several other countries. We have the votes, and I’m hopeful that they will get rid of this current head of the World Bank, put a new person in. And more important than the head of the World Bank is to broaden the mandate, to give them more leverage, that is to come up with terms that allow them to loan money in a way that brings them lots more private capital along with it. That’s, again, what it should be during. And the problem is — well, look at this way. If you look — I mention all of those electricity plants installed worldwide, 90 percent of them are renewable last year. But if you look where they went? Mostly to the rich countries. And if you look at the ones in the U.S. and Canada, 96 percent of the money to build them came from the private sector. In Africa, only 14 percent of the money comes from the private sector, because they don’t have access to these markets. And when they depend on government money, it makes them more vulnerable to these state-owned enterprises that are in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies and there are sometimes corrupt relationships, and they can keep going forward with fossil fuels and there is a so-called Dash for Gas in Africa now, and its fossil fuel colonialism because the resources that are developed are intended to go straight to Europe and straight to Asia. They don’t benefit. The people of Africa, they leave them with what will become stranded assets, because the fossil fuel facilities are no longer competitive now, and as years go by, they are going to be less and less competitive. And it leaves them with climate chaos. So, yes, it’s fossil fuel colonialism. One LNG export terminal in Africa would cost about $25 billion. You could pretty well put renewable energy all across the continent for that.

ISAACSON: One of the topics at the COP27 that you just came back from, that Climate Change Summit, was, I think, it’s called loss and damage, which in some ways, is like a reparation to the countries that were hurts by climate change. Is that something that, I don’t know, is possible politically? And I think Senator Kerry even was not too enthusiastic about it. Tell me about what you think.

GORE: Well, I sympathize with John Kerry’s response on this, because he has to bridge the gap between the just aspirations of these developing countries and the very difficult political situation in the wealthy countries. They don’t want to hear — those — the developing country don’t want to hear us talking about how difficult our politics are, but it’s reality.

ISAACSON: And isn’t there some validity to that?

GORE: If you’re asking me my opinion, I am in favor of payments for loss and damage. I think it’s morally justified. Some European countries have already signed up to it. But it’s justified to point to the realistic political obstacles? Sure, it is. Again, that doesn’t help us, you know, make the countries that are suffering understand any better, but loss and damage is layered on top of a justifiable demands for adaptation funding. You may remember that for the last 10 or 15 years, there has been a $100 billion pledge by the wealthy countries to help poor countries with adaptation to climate. Those pledges haven’t been kept either. And so, it kind of widens the divide between the way developing countries are looking at this and the way the wealthy countries are looking at it. The way to fill that gap is to say, look, the amounts that will ever come, government to government, as justified as they are — and again, I’m for it — but they’re going to be dwarfed by the amounts that should be flowing from private sources, because we are in the early stages of a global, sustainability revolution, empowered by artificial intelligence and machine learning and distributing supercomputing and the biology revolution, this revolution has the scale of the industrial revolution, coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. And Africa and the other developing parts of our world will benefit enormously from this. You know, they leapfrog the landline telephone networks that we rely on and went straight to mobile. It’s a similar situation. They can leapfrog the old, dirty, poisonous sources of energy in the past and go straight to the cheapest energy in the history of the world, according to the International Energy Agency and others. But they need access to capital in order to enter the marketplace and involve themselves in this revolution.

ISAACSON: Vice President Al Gore, thank you so much for joining us.

GORE: Thank you.