Governors' Biofuels Coalition

Gore calls for more resistance

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.”

Most countries have chosen to make deals so far, rather than resist the US. But Gore thinks that events of the past few weeks show that it should get easier for countries to stand up to the world’s largest economy.

The recent Democratic victories in elections in New York City and the states of New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia, combined with a potential for the US Supreme Court to hobble Trump’s ability to levy tariffs, show the limits to Trump’s popularity and power.

Gore also argued that US citizens can now see that Trump’s attacks on renewables are leading to higher electricity prices. “Clean technology is the future,” Gore said, adding that “Trump is shooting the US in both feet, really hobbling the US ability to compete in the leading economic sector of the 21st century.”

It might not seem like it now, but the US will come back to fight climate change, Gore said, because it has to. “This very shocking change in the posture of the United States under Donald Trump is unfortunate,” he said. “It’s regrettable, but let’s not overreact to it.”

What happens at COP30 as delegates put together a negotiating text will show whether the world takes Gore’s advice, with less than a week left before diplomats depart Brazil.

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