By Elizabeth Willoughby on
Despite that the current US president pulled out of the Paris climate accord earlier this year, former vice president and current activist, Al Gore, still says he comes down on the side of hope.
Following his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, about the effects of global warming, Gore released a follow up documentary last month called An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which speaks to the human ingenuity that is behind his hope.
In an NPR interview, Gore said that with the fossil fuel industry financing an industry of climate denial through pseudo scientists and pseudoscientific reports, enough doubt was created so that the sense of urgency about solving the crisis was lost. “But because Mother Nature has a more persuasive voice than any of us,” he says, “they’re losing this battle. The Paris agreement was truly a historic breakthrough, illustrating that all around the world, opinions are getting stronger and stronger in favor of solving the climate crisis.”
He cites other signs of hope as well. “Electricity from the sun and the wind is now in many regions much cheaper than electricity from dirty fossil fuels,” says Gore. "Electric cars are becoming affordable. Batteries are coming down very quickly in cost and, coupled with renewable energy, will utterly transform the world’s energy systems.
“And along with sustainable agriculture and forestry, we now have a chance to use these tools to really solve the climate crisis in time to avoid the catastrophic consequences that would otherwise fall upon us.”
The question is, will we?.
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