Twenty -five years ago, Al Gore was in the last stretch of his US presidential campaign, only weeks away from a choice that would eventually slip through his fingers despite winning the popular vote. His platform included ambitious climate action, with America placed as the natural leader of a global environmental transition.
The irony of what has happened since is not lost on him. “If I see from that point of view 25 years ago, I must say no, I would not have seen this as the most likely result,” admits Gore, as he was asked about China’s emergence as the world’s leading strength in the energy transition, a reality that would have seemed almost amazing for the candidate who once hoped to rule the US climate policy from the oval office.
But Gore does not complain China’s climate leadership as much as celebrating that someone is stepping up while expressing frustration that America has issued the field. As for he is concerned, the planet doesn’t care which country is leading the charges against sustainability as long as someone does. What worries him more is the opportunity costs, the feeling that American innovation and influence could accelerate global progress if the country was not busy running its own climate policies.
Gore and Lila Preston from Sustainability Focused Investment Company Generations Investment Management spoke with this editor early Monday morning about their ninth annual climate report, which extensively documents both about setbacks in US climate policy and China’s remarkable increase as what they call the world’s “first electro state.”
We spent a lot of our conversation investigating what makes headlines right now: the growing appetite of the tech industry on rare earth minerals, and what responsible mining can look like what AI boom’s demand for massive data centers could affect global energy consumption, and whether the space industry’s rocket is really launching the net positive for the climate goals, The following are excerpts from the chat, edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to the full conversation via TechCrunch’s Strictlyvc Download Podcast (below).
You’ve been tracking these sustainability trends for years now. Given the political whiplash between US administrations, should other countries stop expecting America to lead to long -term global challenges?
AL GORE: There is a large wheel that turns in the right direction and there are some smaller wheels inside the large wheel turning in the opposite direction. The world is moving very powerfully – if you look back 10 years to the time of the Paris agreement, 55% of all energy investments still went to fossil fuels, and only 45% for the energy transition. Now these numbers have more than turned: 65% of financing comes to renewable energy sources and only 35% for fossils, and this trend accelerates.
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The United States have played a key role, but it has been back and forth with changes in party control, which is unfortunate because the world would greatly benefit from sustained, consistent leadership from the United States, we will survive this setback in the form of all these negative steps taken by Trump. The rest of the world is moving forward and even the United States will continue to move on, albeit at a slower pace.
The report suggests that China is becoming the world’s first “electro -state” while the United States is giving up the race for pure technical leadership. Could you have imagined this scenario 25 years ago?
GORE: If I see from that point of view 25 years ago, I must say no, I would not have seen this as the most likely result. But I was always impressed with the degree to which Chinese leadership listened carefully to their scientific community.
The story becomes clearer now. As repeated record drought cut their hydrocapacity, some regional leaders began to feel concerned that redundancies could follow, so they have built coal factories and use of them for 50% exploitation or less. Meanwhile, the breakout construction of solar energy has been amazing; They reached their sun target six years early. This year, they have opened essentially equivalent with three new nuclear plants with a gigawatt every day in sun capacity for a few months. It’s just incredible.
At the beginning of this year, they informed the world that they no longer want to be judged after measuring carbon intensity, but by actual reductions. It’s a clear signal because they never stick to a standard they don’t think they can meet and exceed.
When we talked about coal, EPA recently suggested to end a claim for thousands of coal factories and refineries to report greenhouse gas emissions. What does it mean when we stop measuring the problem we try to solve?
GORE: It is part of their apparent intention to try to make the crisis go away by getting all the information describing the crisis to go away. But there are some improved news. The partners of Generation Investment Management have been among the most important seed financing drivers of climate trajectory who track atmospheric carbon emissions in real time.
We are now measuring 99% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide-the largest 660 million points source emission sites. We have them all in the US, the old cliche says you can only control what you measure and we will continue to have measurements of all significant greenhouse gas pollution in the US
Lila Preston: We see Klimaspor, working with the private sector on the visibility of the supply chain. Companies like balcony, one of our portfolio companies, have collaborated with them to provide real -time assessment of the supply chain risk and opportunity.
Back in January, President Trump announced $ 500 billion Stargate project to build massive AI data centers that started in Texas. Your report is talking about increasing electricity demand threatens to get in pure energy. Is there a way of pursuing ambitious AI development without torpedoing our climate goals?
Preston: This is the best problem at the system level we have ever had to work through. The huge demand wave – approx. 65% come from the US – represent a shock to the system. Energy consumption from data centers is 2% today and is expected to be least doubled by 2030. But we believe that renewable energy sources, storage and long -term geothermal can meet this requirement.
The back is how AI applications across energy, transport and agriculture can reduce global emissions – some say 6% to 10% annually in 2035. There is also a significant waterprint – a trillion gallon annually in 2027. We need to think holistically about this massive platform change.
GORE: Important efforts are beginning to provide pure baseload power to support the decoupling of emission intensity and calculate intensity. Many of the largest builders of new AI capacity acknowledge that the cost benefits at Solar Plus batteries are now so great that it makes sense to use this as an extra spur to build Solar Plus batteries. Many are also consumer -facing companies that are still required to tell their user base that they remain dedicated to sustainability goals, although this temporary increase will balloon electricity consumption for data centers.
On the same topic, Elon Musk’s Xai reportedly did not serve -charged gas turbines for over a year at his Memphis data center in a historic black neighborhood that already has air quality problems.
GORE: It’s definitely a big concern. My friends and past components of southwest Memphis have already been through a lot of environmental injustice, and having a 97% black community that already has a 5x cancer risk compared to the national average is assaulted by these extra emissions from large methane turbine generators is really unfair.
They come out of a successful match to stop a high-pressure oil pipeline in going straight through their community and water source. But as soon as it was blocked, Tennessee State Legislature adopted a law that said that no community, no city or county, can disrupt any kind of infrastructure with fossil fuel in the future. It is an example of how the fossil fuel industry, as I have often said, is far better at catching politicians than catching emissions.
They have used their political and economic power to capture control over the policy process in too many jurisdictional room, regional, state and in the case of the Trump administration, national politics. They also blasted the plastic negotiation because it is their third largest market, petrochemicals, and used their power to prevent the world from limiting the amount of plastic particles we absorb in our bodies.
But the world catches up with them, and people in communities like Memphis and elsewhere say, “Wait for a moment, we will not take all this unreasonable burden here.”
This plastic grows unabated is a great story. Noble metals are another great story about this year, partly because customs threats have emphasized the need of the tech industry for these to make their products. What is your attitude about what hunting for these materials means for our environment?
GORE: These materials need to be extracted responsibly and sustainably, and they can be. There must be aggressive efforts to eliminate violent and harmful practices we have seen in some places. But if you look at the quantities, this is such a small percentage compared to the damage from mining and extraction of fossil fuels every single day.
Preston: We see innovation using advanced modeling and AI for views and targeted where these materials would sit while reducing the load on the landscape and local communities. It is not perfect, but there has been many progress in the last three to four years when alarm bells were raised globally that this had to be made more sustainable.
While we’re talking about tech, the space industry is blooming. Sending multiple rockets also generates significant carbon emissions. Do you think we should regulate the emissions associated with space launches, or justify the climate advantages of space technology carbon footprint?
GORE: I have always been of the opinion that the utility of earth observation from space exceeds the damage from space launches with a fair measure.
Do you look at this year’s report, what are your biggest reasons for optimism and concern?
GORE: What continues to burn my optimism is the stable and even accelerating progress for all the solutions we need. They continue to become cheaper and the fossil fuel industry’s ability to withstand this transition is reduced regularly. This transition is unstoppable.
But the remaining question is whether we make this transition in time to avoid negative rocking points. Right in the last few days, we got a fantastic report that the cold growing along the western coast of South America – Humboldt stream, which was so important to the marine food chain – did not happen this year for the first time ever.
I’m happy with Dornbusch’s law: Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. I think we have crossed this point now, but we have to speed up the change. We have the technologies, the implementation models, the economy is in our favor, public opinion is in our favor – we just have to speed up the fall in the ability of polluting industries to withstand it.