Former US Vice President Al Gore has been a fixture at United Nations environmental summits for more than three decades.
Despite having last held elected office in 2001, Gore still has a sharp sense of US politics. And at his appearance at COP30, he had a message for the world: “We may have passed peak Trump,” giving world leaders an opening to keep pursuing emissions cuts.
Gore still gets a rockstar reception at climate talks, with people wanting to shake his hand, take a selfie or simply say thank you. He handled the well-wishers with humility. “As Paul Simon sang, ‘You can call me Al,’” he said as I sat down to interview him
on stage at the TED Countdown House in Belém. “Either that or ‘Your Adequacy,’”
he added to laughter from the audience.
Gore has been a climate world stalwart, starting with the first US congressional hearing on global warming in 1976. He went on to win an Oscar for his movie An Inconvenient
Truth and organized hundreds of sessions on “climate reality” to inform people about the urgent need to address climate change. Most notably, Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 alongside the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
President Donald Trump has coveted that award, even as he’s done much to undo climate progress. That’s made COP30 unlike any COP Gore has attended.
It’s the first time the US government hasn’t sent an official delegation to the annual conference. That may actually make progress more likely, though; the US has used hardball tactics at other multilateral forums to force nations to back down on climate policies. The most recent involved threats to levy tariffs and revoke visas for bureaucrats from countries that supported a carbon fee on shipping emissions. Those efforts were successful, with nations punting shipping emissions rules down the road.
So what should world leaders do in the face of such tactics? “They should stiffen their spine,” Gore said. Next time the US government tries “to bully other nations to make the
wrong choice — the easy wrong choice — it’s important for nations to stand up.”
The final statement included plenty of warnings on the cost of inaction but few provisions for how the world might address dangerously rising global temperatures head-on.
The “paper promises of Paris”.
When push comes to shove, the number drops from 200 to 80.
After a two-week summit near the mouth of the Amazon marked by sweltering heat and daily rainstorms, gone is the grand ambition of the decade after 2015 Paris Agreement when nearly 200 countries joined in a pledge to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C…
“The transition away from fossil fuels is key to keeping the door open to 1.5C,” Tina Stege said. “So let’s get behind the idea of a fossil fuels road map, work together and make a plan.”
Roughly 80 nations had united behind the push — a significant number, but short of the supermajority that forced the landmark pledge to transition away from fossil fuels in Dubai two years ago.
A leading climate scientist has denounced the Paris climate change agreement as a “fraud” - saying there is "no action, just promises”.
Professor James Hansen - credited as being the “father of climate change awareness” - told the Guardian the talks that culminated in a deal on Saturday were just “worthless words”.
Speaking as the final draft of the deal was published on Saturday afternoon, he said: “It’s just b******t for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.