NEW YORK CITY - Former Vice President Al Gore paid a visit to the Big Apple earlier this month to help train a new cohort of climate activists just ahead of Earth Day. The training session, which took place from April 12 to 14, was part of The Climate Reality Project, Gore’s nonprofit that focuses on providing tools and resources to grassroots organizers so they can better tackle issues related to climate change and environmental justice in their own neighborhoods. Gore, who has become one of the most recognizable climate advocates globally since stepping away from elected politics, also held a private roundtable discussion with a small group of journalists to talk about anything from the upcoming presidential election to the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long misinformation campaign on global warming. Here’s what the former vice president had to say. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Please take a look at the new openings in our newsroom. On what a second Trump term could mean for climate change: The technological tailwinds - with the continuing cost reductions for solar and wind electricity, for battery storage, for green hydrogen, for electric vehicles, etc. - will continue to move the sustainability revolution forward regardless of who is president. But our chance to accelerate that progress to the levels that are necessary to really solve this crisis would be taken away if an anti-climate president came into office. And we saw this in 2017, when a lot of the progress that was already underway did continue, but there were no new initiatives and there was a stagnation when there should have been an acceleration. On whether climate voters will support Biden: I think that President Biden has earned their support even though he’s done some things that I disagree with strongly. The specific gravity of the Inflation Reduction Act out-balances almost all of the other issues involved... |