HONORABLE AL GORE

"So long as markets find carbon pollution to be invisible and irrelevant to the billions of market transactions every hour then it will be far more difficult to reach our goal."

Honorable Al Gore
Former Vice President of the United States

Former Vice-President of the United States Al Gore and co-founder and Chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm focused on sustainable investing, speaks to Nathan Williams about the continuing battle against climate change.

What is your view of current progress being made at a global level on tackling climate change and moving towards a low carbon economy?

There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that there is a massive transformation underway at the grass roots level in a great many countries around the world. The less encouraging news is that governments have not yet made a collective commitment to putting a price on carbon. This is the only way to institutionalise this as a priority in routine decision making day in day out. Efforts by climate deniers to manufacture doubt among publics about the seriousness of the crisis have taken a toll and, more significantly, the massive campaign contributions and lobbying activities by large carbon polluters have paralysed the political process in the United States and complicated it in other countries. Without U.S. leadership progress at the international level is agonisingly slow.

China recently pledged to reduce emissions growth relative to GDP by 17 per cent over the next five years. Is this realistic and how can it be achieved?

China's appears to be very serious about making progress and they are moving with impressive determination. They are shutting down factories which exceed carbon dioxide quotas, enacting a series of new environmental taxes and have embarked upon several Manhattan project-scale initiatives in solar energy, wind, high speed trains and smart grids. They have planted two-and-a-half time more trees than the rest of the world combined for the last several years. They're also still opening a new coal plant every eight or nine days but even there they are adopting far more efficient technology.  So I think on balance it is realistic that they will meet target they've set themselves and I would not be surprised to see them exceed it if they continue bringing down the cost of solar and wind.

How does China's progress compare with that of the U.S?

China is providing leadership on a full range of renewable technologies and the U.S. is moving much more slowly.

Do you think the business community is serious about meeting its climate change obligations?

Overall it is impressive to see the amount of activity in almost every business sector. The problem is that a significant fraction of one sector, the oil, coal and gas sectors, are actively seeking to paralyse the political process and block the policy changes that are needed.  Some of these companies are paying thousands of anti-climate lobbyists and making enormous campaign contributions tied explicitly or implicitly to support for anti-climate votes in the House and Senate to the point where there are now four anti-climate lobbyists for every member of Congress.

How has the financial crisis set back efforts to combat climate change?

Economic stress of the kind we experienced in 2008 and 2009 sensitises politicians to the fear of doing anything that might make them vulnerable to attacks from business. However, I think the message is well understood that we can create millions of jobs and reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil by moving more aggressively towards renewable energy.  The fact that complex instruments played a role in triggering the financial crisis made some allergic to the idea of carbon trading. Although I understand that I still do believe policy instruments should be used and I've long favoured CO2 taxes offset by reductions in other taxes.

According to recent polls, the number of people which doubt human activity is causing climate change is rising. Why is this?

There has been a lavishly financed campaign of public deception that has been aimed at this outcome.   There were self inflicted wounds by the ICCC when it failed to catch a handful of relatively small but hurtful mistakes in their last climate assessment and the East Anglia email controversy was blown out of all proportion even though five separate independent reviews have cleared them of any wrong-doing.

What policy measures would you like to see enacted by 2020?

We have to put a price on carbon. So long as markets find carbon pollution to be invisible and irrelevant to the billions of market transactions every hour then it will be far more difficult to reach our goal. We also need an agreement which reduces deforestation and enhances tree planting.

Are you optimistic about the future?

Several countries have announced impressive plans and I am optimistic overall but we don't have the luxury of a great deal of time. We are putting 90 million tonnes of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every twenty-four hours and one-quarter of that will still be there twenty thousand years from now. The reality of the climate crisis continually reasserts itself and it is only a matter of time before we reach a political tipping point beyond which publics around the world demand governments act.