¶ Introduction to the Climate Crisis
This episode of Climate Forward is brought to you by our 2025 sponsors: presenting sponsor Pratt Industries, and associate sponsors AstraZeneca, L'Oreal Group, and World Food Program USA.
This is David Gellis, the managing correspondent of the Climate Forward Newsletter and Event Center. Here at the New York Times. In just a few days, we'll host our annual Climate Forward Summit, bringing together world leaders, scientists, And innovators who are tackling the climate crisis head on. This year, the subject on everyone's mind is President Trump and the ways in which his administration is up.
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And around the world. Under President Trump, the United States is no longer participating in the global fight against climate change. The administration is rolling back pollution regulations, attacking the renewable power business, and the environmental movement. is in its own state of crazy. To help us make sense of all this, we've turned to someone who has been working on climate issues for decades and who is familiar with the Oval Office. Former Vice President Al Gore.
And last June was the hottest June. That came right on the heels of nineteen ninety-seven, which was the warmest year on record.
Gore worked to raise the alarm about climate change when he was vice president during the nineteen nineties, but he really staked his claim to the issue twenty years ago.
If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years. And the hottest of all was 2005.
When he starred in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, that film truly broke through to the main
And the Oscar goes to an inconvenient trip.
Winning the Oscar for best documentary feature. And helping gore win a Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, Gore has become basically a full-time climate campaigner, traveling the world and calling on countries to rapidly take action to avoid the worst effects of global warming. And yet, after decades of efforts to address the problem, it can often seem like little progress has been made. Planet warming emissions continue their upward march.
A new study finds emissions of methane are rising at the fastest rate ever recorded.
Global temperatures keep on hitting new highs.
The deadly flooding tragedy in central Texas.
Stop word.
And extreme weather is getting worse. Against this backdrop, Trump is easing regulations designed to protect the environment is easy to be able to do that.
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During our conversation, former Vice President Gore called climate change the problem from hell. We talked about the state of the climate movement, extreme weather, the Trump administration's impact on U.S. climate policy, and the subsidies that continue to prop up fossil fuels. We also discussed where he looks to for hope in the next generation of grassroots leaders.
and what he thinks an effective playbook for climate action looks like today. Now, before we begin, a bit about Gore. He can be philosophical, discursive. He sometimes speaks in metaphors, But he brings to this conversation 40 years of experience in the climate movement, making his perspective especially relevant at a crucial moment for an issue that affects us all.
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¶ Barriers to Climate Action Progress
I want to begin with this central question of why it hasn't worked. And let me just rewind us back to 2006. You released An Inconvenient Truth, this documentary that really broke through to the mainstream. And that was this wake-up call moment. Why didn't that work?
Well the massive decades-long campaign of denial and obstruction from the fossil fuel industry is the major part of it. That's not But it would be a mistake, in my view, to underestimate how significant their role has been. They are virtually hegemonic in all of the policy areas that are important to the future of their business. But let me move on from the fossil fuel industry because the second reason is simple inertia.
We are not used to dealing with a global challenge of this magnitude, and eighty percent of all the energy used in the world is still from fossil fuels, uh, and a major part of the financial sector has grown dependent on the fees from all the fossil fuel deals that they oversee, and their lobbying power has joined with the fossil fuel folks.
When you made the film, did you believe that humanity had a chance to act faster? Or at that moment, did you even understand then that it was going to be extraordinarily difficult? to change society, to avert the place that we've arrived at now.
Oh yeah, I assumed it was gonna be incredibly difficult. This has been called the the problem from hell for decades.
And by two thousand six when my first movie came out, I had already been working on this for thirty years, so I had a pretty good sense of how difficult it was gonna be but You know, uh, David, that I'm fond of uh Dornbush's law named after the late Rudy Dornbush, who said things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen faster than you thought they could. That pattern of uh change that
seems to start agonizingly slowly and then all of a sudden there's an inflection point and it just zooms uh toward much faster change than anybody thought was possible. We've seen that in technology, we've seen it in politics. too and in social movements and I have believed for a long time that that is the pattern the world is likely to follow in organizing a response to the climate crisis.
Uh now and I don't wanna peddle hopium, false hope. Uh I do believe that the outcome is as of now uh still uncertain. But I have faith and confidence that we are going to see that inflection point.
¶ Public Awareness and Extreme Weather
Here I wanna pause and recognize when we talk about systemic change, you've already identified a number of sort of different buckets of actors, which is to say there's the policymakers. There's the corporations. But I'm curious what your read is on the general public. Do you feel like people understand climate change in a different way than they did twenty years ago? And do they care?
Uh very definitely the answer to both those questions is yes. the understanding uh is very different than twenty years ago for sure. Uh and Mother Nature's participation in this discussion is very different than it was twenty years ago. You know, um two months ago We had twelve once in a thousand year climate-related extreme events in the US in the space of three days.
Uh i i just incredible. Six in North Carolina, six in Texas. One of'em was that horrible tragedy where the children in the Guadalupe River Valley were killed. But there were eleven other uh once in a thousand year events during that same three day period. That's happening all over the world, David. You know, I often say every night on the T V news is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation. It's just astonishing what
is going on. And so yes, people understand it differently, and the public opinion polls around the world also indicate that.
For those of us who haven't read the Book of Revelation recently, can you explain what you mean?
Well there are all kinds of uh of uh horrors that are described uh in the book of Revelation. I I'm not uh learned enough to give you the historical context of what all of the events described in that book refer to, but they're not good. They sound, you know, very threatening like the end of civilization. What I mean by the phrase is very unusual catastrophes of a kind that ha have never been or very rarely in the past.
been seen are happening with great regularity, much greater intensity. And people have not failed to notice that.
¶ Trump's Policies and Fossil Fuel Subsidies
The last time I saw Gore, we were at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was January, and it was actually the very day that President Trump was getting inaugurated. And we sat there and had a conversation about what this administration might mean for climate change in the United States and abroad. And he didn't mince words. He said it was going to be bad.
So when I caught up with him more recently for this conversation, I asked him if nine months later, things were even worse than he expected they might be. And he said yes, they were. There was the rollback of pollution controls, the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, the censoring of federal climate scientists. and the US retreat from international efforts to address global warming. And in the midst of this litany of issues, Gore told me where he thought the damage was clearest.
Well, I think his biggest impact has been in the US, for sure.
And is it is it on the industrial side? Is it on the science side? What like what's bugging you the most when you watch what this administration is doing?
uh the increasing subsidies for fossil fuel. and the increasing uh policy favors for fossil fuels that are taking place at the exact same time that he is trying to completely destroy any uh encouragement for the accelerating uh energy transition. You know, I I wanna point out a a correlation between two numbers that I think is very, very significant. The uh experts in finance are saying that each year the subsidies for fossil fuels are four point four trillion dollars per year.
Simultaneously, the International Energy Agency estimates that the amount needed to finance the energy transition is four point five trillion dollars per year, essentially the exact same amount. If we simply eliminated the subsidies for the destruction of humanity's future, then we would have the resources that we need. to accelerate the transition. But
You make it sound so easy.
Well, i you know, when people say uh y uh where's the money gonna come from? Well there that that's an answer to that question.
When you consider someone like Secretary Wright, do you believe when he says he doesn't believe that climate change poses a real threat to humanity, that he is being disingenuous? Or do you believe that that's actually how he understands the world?
You know, Upton Sinclair wrote more than a century ago it's difficult to get a man to understand something uh if his income depends upon him not understanding. you can take your question and apply it to the world as a whole. Uh why is the world as a whole taking as long as it is? to translate uh the uh clear understandings of the climate crisis that are now uh ubiquitously available into action
Why has it been so difficult to to get the world to move? And I think there are answers to that question, and I do think that we are making significant progress, no question about that. It's just not Yet at a scale that matches the need.
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¶ Climate Tipping Points and Grassroots Power
So why has it been so difficult to get the world to move on this issue? We're now on a trajectory to pass two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, possibly even three degrees. And that is a level of warming that scientists warn will unleash truly catastrophic effects across the globe. Given that, I wanted to know which of these Book of Revelation scenarios Gore was most concerned about.
Was it the potential collapse of the AMOC, the Atlantic meridianal overturning circulation, which is this giant conveyor belt in the ocean that carries warm water north and cold water south? Was it human migration? Was it biodiversity and agricultural collapse? Which of these scenarios was keeping him up at night?
I don't wanna uh delve into the uh dozen or more uh tipping points that the scientists are focused on. The the Gulf Stream, which is part of the AMOC that's certainly one that i is uh extremely important. And of course there was just a very mysterious uh disappearance of the cold water upwelling off the west coast of South America that's uh an essential part of the
That was the first time ever. First time ever it didn't appear, which I thought was astonishing.
And the scientists themselves are a a astonished. And one thinks back uh decades ago to the ways scientists were astonished by the sudden uh opening of that stratospheric uh uh ozone hole and they didn't expect it uh and struggled to explain it. And there may be more such uh development.
So who do you think is doing work out there that's impactful? Not to suggest that you're going anywhere anytime soon, but when you think about that next generation of leaders on an issue like this, who do you look to?
Oh, there's so many of them. I'm just blown away by the the skill and excellence of the grassroots uh activists uh that are out there in every country. I honestly believe, David, that this is emerging as the largest global grassroots movement in history. So many organizations are working together in order to to build this movement. I think they're beginning to have a big impact everywhere.
Give me an example of what that activism looks like, because some activism I think for a lot of people can just seem a disruptive. You interrupting the US Open, you're making noise at an opera. Is that the kind of activism you mean?
Well no it's not what I had in mind. I respect those who take actions that I would not personally act, I'm not gonna go through the individual cases. There's some that I've d definitely not approve of at all. But what I have in mind is active engagement in communicating forcefully to elected officials and to candidates in every race for every office, that this has to be a priority for them.
Hmm.
¶ Finding Hope Through Climate Action
What do you say to people who hear a conversation like this and just roll their eyes? Right? These conversations can frankly turn people off. And I know that's not your intention. But when we talk about The catastrophic book of Revelation stuff. You know, people turn back to TikTok.
Yeah, well I think that uh if you deal with these young activists around the world, you will find they are extremely hopeful. They're not depressed, they're not uh I mean, they may be deeply concerned, but they are energetic, they're hopeful, they see the path forward. You know, just to give one of the other kinds of statistics, the experts in the economic realm have calculated that each dollar invested in the sustainability transition creates three times as many new jobs.
as dollars uh i invested in the old dirty fossil economy. So y you know, there's optimism in holding out a vision of what our future can be with less pollution, more jobs, more hope. uh more positive feeling uh that the world is getting better rather than getting worse. I think that's what people are hungry for.
Uh I mean, focusing on the damage that's being done is important to give people a sense of why it's so important not to give in to the inertia, but focusing on the hopeful future that we can create by making the right policy choice. That's what gets me excited.
You are a professional at this, and you know how to spin even some of the dire statistics and troubling scenarios we've talked about into a a positive frame. But I gotta ask, do you have bad days? Are there times, you know, when it's quiet when you're really concerned?
Oh sure, of course. Uh and you know, the first person to say the antidote to despair is action was Joan Baez back in the nineteen sixties. And I think the antidote to climate despair is climate action. I urge anybody who is tempted to feel despair about this to realize, first of all, we don't have time for despair. We don't have time for it. And to realize that activating yourself Doing something, joining movements and networks that are pushing in the right direction is the antidote to despair.
See, you did it just there. I was like, Do you have bad days? And you're like, Yes, I do. And here's all the good ways you can affect positive change in the world. We've talked about almost thirty years. of international action on climate, of domestic action. Given where we are today, as we acknowledge fossil fuel emissions continue to rise, temperatures continue to rise. What do you believe needs to happen now to actually affect that rapid change that you've described is needed?
Well there is a surge uh in activism and it's always the case that when a president of the United States is on the wrong side of an issue from the majority of the people, then activism increases. I also think that the pressure from other countries is going to be significant.
I'm optimistic, David. I think that we're going to solve this, but it's gonna require a lot more political activism to help change the minds of wavering uh elected officials who are right now on the cusp of uh deciding Between the hard right and the easy wrong.
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That's our show for today. Look for more episodes of Climate Forward later this week when we bring you conversations from stage of the climate forward event. Thanks for listening.
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Climate Forward is a production of the New York Times. This episode was produced and edited by Evan Roberts, mixed by Alyssa Jane Moxley. Original
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The rest of the Climate Forward Event team includes Beth Weinstein, Ryan McCarthy, Hilary Kuhn, Christina Josa, and Yen Wei Liu. Special thanks to Maddie Massiello, Nick Pittman. and Jeffrey Miranda.
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