Former US vice president Al Gore believes a second Donald Trump term in the White House may have little impact on the “momentum” of the world’s fight against climate change.
The return of Trump, who has pledged to pull the United States from the Paris agreement for a second time, has cast a pall over UN COP29 climate talks in Baku this week.
But Gore echoed statements from President Joe Biden’s climate team who sought to remind other countries that global action survived Trump’s first presidency.
“We’ve been through this before,” Gore told reporters Thursday ahead of Friday’s release of the latest data findings from Climate TRACE, an independent tracker of global emissions he co-founded.
“He tried one time before and the world continued to reduce emissions even during his four years as president the last time,” he said.
“There is so much more momentum that even a new Trump administration is not going to be able to slow it down much. I hope I’m right about that,” he said.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate said market forces were “giving us a tailwind”, with renewable energy getting cheaper and increasingly used to generate electricity.
“Many people around the world are not simply waiting with bated breath to see what the United States is going to do, they’re moving on their own,” he said.
While a US retreat from its commitments “would not be a good thing”, Gore said, “I think the progress is likely to continue, regardless.”
Climate TRACE’s new data showed Friday that greenhouse gas emissions rose 0.7 percent in 2023 and will likely increase by 0.48 percent this year.
The group, which uses artificial intelligence to analyse satellite images from around the planet, said it now has inventories for every state and province in the world as well as over 9,000 urban areas.
‘Petrostates have seized control’
The former US vice president had singled out the emissions of the United Arab Emirates when he presented Climate TRACE data at last year’s COP28 conference hosted by the oil power.
This year, Gore showed slides of the 200 largest emissions sites in COP29 host Azerbaijan, a country whose economy is highly dependent on oil and gas production and exports.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev hailed oil and gas as a “gift of God” when he addressed fellow leaders at COP29 on Tuesday.
“It’s unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree,” Gore said Thursday.
While the Dubai summit produced a global agreement on “transitioning away” from fossil fuels, the follow-up commitment “has been very weak” and the issue “is hardly even mentioned” at COP29, he said.
“I have to think that one of the reasons for that is that the petrostates have too much control over the process,” he said.