Al Gore says 'We may have passed peak Trump'

People are going to hate me. I won't move on with my life. And I was so petrified of being dragged across the coals for reporting them. And I still am. My name is Laura Hughes, and for the past two years, I've been uncovering the United Kingdom's perplexing relationship with lead. What I've found has shocked me. From the Financial Times, this is Untold. Toxic legacy. Out now. Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatharathi. This week, Elgore on a rogue US. Last week at COP, I had the great privilege of speaking with former US vice president, Elgore, one of the grandees of the climate world. His film, An Inconvenient Truth, won him an Oscar and has inspired generations of climate activists. And alongside the intergovernmental panel on climate change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to obtain and disseminate information about the climate challenge. Vice President Gore has been a guest on Zero before, back in 2023, when a lot of wind seemed to be in the sails of climate action. But since Trump's return to office, those fair winds have dropped, at least in the US, and climate action seems on a much more turbulent course worldwide. So I wanted to catch up with Vice President Gore to hear what his experience in the US government and his understanding of how the US can wield power on the global stage can teach us about the current moment. We had a wide-ranging conversation at COP 13 Belen. And we are going to split that conversation over the next two episodes. Part one today and part two on Thursday this week. Subscribe to Zero to hear part two later in the week and send me your feedback on [email protected]. For now, here is part one of my conversation with Al Gore, recorded at a live event at Ted Countdown House during COP 30 in Brazil. We'll discuss how countries should deal with the rogue US, whether countries are being pulled into China's orbit, EIS climate impact, and how to depolarize climate action. Vice President. Akshad. Welcome to Ted Countdown House. As Paul Simon is saying, you can call me Al. Either that or your adequacy. So I know we are at a climate summit. We'll talk a lot about climate. But I want to start with a bigger question. The US government is attacking the rules-based order that previous administrations help build. How exactly should world leaders deal with the rogue US when they are worried about defending their borders that are dependent on US guarantees, when they are worried about maintaining their industry that is dependent on US exports that they make, when they are dependent on US foreign aid to fight poverty, when they aren't able to keep visual on the infectious diseases that could become the next pandemic, that the US is now cutting outbreak monitoring for how to deal with the rogue US? Yeah, well, everybody wants to know the answer to that question. And I wish I knew a definitive answer, Akshad. But yes, under President Trump, his administration is launching an assault on the rules-based order. And the rules-based order also depends at the most basic foundational level on a decent respect for truthfulness in communications among nations and within democracies. And he has discarded any notion of respecting truthfulness. And so it's a major challenge for the entire world. However, it's important not to overemphasize the singular importance of the US in the world system. It's natural that we do that in part because for the last 70-plus years since World War II, the US has been the natural leader of the world system. Forgive me if that sounds like too much American pride, but it's been the case and widely recognized. And so now when that changes, there's a natural inclination to say, "Oh, my gosh, what now?" But to put it in the context of climate, 10 years ago in Paris, 195 nations signed the agreement. Only one has withdrawn, only one. And a friend of mine who's the leader of another country said, "You know, there's an equation that's worth remembering. 195 minus one does not equal zero." And to say that a different way, even though there is a great deal of harm and even more risk associated with the US withdrawal from Paris and withdrawal from the rule-based order, it does also create a space within which other nations can discover a new path for themselves. There is no other successor to the US as the leader of the world system that is easily identified. The EU has the base of values that most people around the world have respected when they look at the US. But they have a multiple voices problem and a very fine chief executive, but not a strong chief executive. It could be they could evolve into a role of that sort. China very much wants to be the successor to the US, but because they do not share the values or at least do not manifest in their behavior and their laws and policies, the values that most people around the world aspire to, I think it's highly unlikely that the world will follow China. So we're in this period where one era is ending and the other is struggling to be born. One of the great poets in the Spanish language, Antonio Machado, said, "Traveler, there is no road. "You must make the path as you walk." And I think that's the situation that we are confronting now. But people are continuing to move in the right direction. You know, if you look in the US in the first year of, well, last year in the US, at all the new electricity generation installed, 97% was renewable. That's unlikely to change very much, at least, just because Donald Trump says, "Reopen these coal plants. Stop building new renewables." It's like King Canute saying, "Stop the tide, you know. "It doesn't work." And now it does have some implications, of course. And it emboldens bad actors like Saudi Arabia, for example, to be even more aggressive in trying to halt any kind of climate solutions. And it also gives a little bit of cover to some forces within allied countries that are not enthusiastic about climate solutions. Gives them a little cover to slow things down a little bit. But overall, if I could offer you a visual metaphor, what I see in my perception of the world is there's a big wheel turning very powerfully in the right direction. And within it, there's some little wheels going in the opposite direction. And we tend to focus on each one of those little wheels that pops up, but even they are being moved inexorably in the direction of this sustainability revolution, which has the magnitude of the industrial revolution coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. It is unstoppable. I'm thoroughly confident that solar electricity famously is the cheapest electricity in the entire history of the world. And it continues to get cheaper still. Wind is almost there. The only thing that's come down faster in cost than photovoltaic solar is utility-scale batteries. And now they're being installed throughout the grid. So I think that this very shocking change in the posture of the United States under Donald Trump is unfortunate. It's regrettable. But let's don't overreact to it. Let's keep moving because the world is continuing to move in the right direction. - Countries definitely react to crises with creative solutions. And we are starting to see that in many places. But it's important also to note that it's not just attack on the rules-based order. It's breaking norms of all kinds. So here at COP we have to get any agreement through consensus. I'm going to come to you about COP reform a little bit later. But there are other multilateral forums where you can get a majority vote to be able to force the world to follow a path. And so for the last many years, the International Maritime Organization has been working to try and get a global carbon tax on shipping, which could have the kinds of implication that Paris Agreement had, where there would be a global price on carbon, finally. And we were very close. In October, countries were very confident that they had enough votes for a majority decision. That's all that was needed. And then comes in the US. And we have heard extraordinary stories of what happened to try and get that vote sunk, which the US was a part of. Norms of all sorts broken. Not just threats made to countries on the White House website saying we'll tariff you if you vote for it, but personal calls made to diplomats, to bureaucrats, saying we'll revoke your visa to the US, that we'll put individual sanctions. Now, as vice president, you know how much power the US can wield on the global stage. How should countries be preparing for what other types of shenanigans come from the US? Well, they should stiffen their spines. And by the way, what happened with the IMO is a specific example of a dynamic that I referred to earlier. I don't think, and people who know more about these negotiations than I do have also come to the conclusion, that it's unlikely Saudi Arabia would have played the role they did if they had not been able to hide behind Trump and pushed along with Trump. So we do need to be aware of other such situation. We saw it on the Plastics Treaty as well and other negotiations. So this is a time for nations around the world who understand how much of our futures at risk to be firm and stand up. I had a mentor when I was a child who said, we all face the same choice in life over and over again. It's the choice between the hard right and the easy wrong. And I'm sure that resonates with a lot of people in our personal lives, we face that throughout our lives. Nations also face it. And right now, it's particularly important for nations to stand up to this bullying. And I was glad, for example, that the United Kingdom and some other nations took the stand they just did on the blowing up of these boats in the Caribbean. These are snuff movies. This is murder for entertainment. And the UK and others said, no, we cannot abide by this. And there's so many other-- the Catholic bishops just made a conservative group in the main, just made a very bold and brave statement on the mass deportations without proper due process. And when the next climate proposal comes up, when the next international treaty of any sort, where they try to bully other nations to make the wrong choice, the easy wrong choice, it's important for nations to stand up. I mean, Trump himself is a kind of an emergency facing the world. There will not be a third Trump term. He has definitively finally even stopped joking about that. So there is a lame duck vibe that is new in Washington. The elections a week ago, Tuesday, were a dramatic surprise for most of the prognosticators who predicted in our state of New Jersey, for example. They thought, well, either candidate can win. We don't really know. Well, she won by a huge landslide, massive landslide. Same thing in Virginia. Same thing in two important elections in Georgia. Elections in Pennsylvania on the Supreme Court, the California redistricting plan. Now, there's no way to look in a crystal ball and assure yourself that that's going to determine the results a year from this month in the off-term congressional elections. But I guarantee you that Republican members of the House and Senate paid very close attention. And we've seen now four Republican senators break from the president on one of the major tariff votes. We've seen several House Republicans break with him on some of the economic policy votes and on some other matters. We also have seen the Supreme Court take a very different approach. And the oral arguments two weeks ago, I'm getting into the weeds here a little bit, but it's important because the oral arguments on the big tariff case convince many observers of the Supreme Court that the deference or obsequiousness that the Supreme Court has shown to Trump and so many other cases over the last year is not going to prevail in this case. I don't know. It's a prediction, but it sure seems as if they may take away his radical, unstable use of care. I mean, no single person should have that much policy, especially in the United States. My larger point, though, is that there may be a change. We may have passed peak Trump, you know? We may have. I don't know if that's the case for sure, but there's a famous old joke about somebody who falls off an age story building and passes a window washer on the fourth floor and says, "So far, so good." So it hasn't even been a year yet. And, you know, he's destroyed the east wing of the White House. And I don't want to-- you've triggered me now. And I don't really want to spend too much time talking about him. I'm afraid we're going to have to send a little more time, at least on the US. Now, one way in which we've seen reaction from world leaders is actually to not stand up to Trump, to try and make deals. There have been some leaders who have stood up to Trump, and some of them are in this continent. We've had President Lula from Brazil stand up to Trump, even though the tariffs have been going up and up. There's been President Petro from Colombia who has stood up for the attacks that are happening in the Caribbean on those boats. Even India has stood up to Trump to some extent when the tariffs were increased. OK, can I pause for a moment? So the journalists have given me the clear impression and have reported facts that clearly imply that what happened on those tariffs on India is that Trump got on this gig where he was trying to make claim credit for stopping wars all over the world. India-Pakistan was the biggest example. And the deputy prime minister of Pakistan, having learned one of the lessons that world leaders have learned that if you flatter the hell out of Trump, you're more likely to get what you want. He nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. And so Trump called Modi, and he wanted Modi to join Pakistan in nominating for the-- and Modi from the reporting said, what the hell are you talking about? I did that. You had nothing to do with that. The very next day, he put a 50% tariff on India. After decades of bipartisan efforts in the United States, the administrations of both parties, trying to pull India more in the US sphere, the Indo-Pacific concept, is part of that whole effort. And just to throw that out the window because of a personal agreement over he's not getting enough credit for this or that, that is a clear example of why the founders of the US were so correct in saying, no person should have such unlimited power. There have to be checks and balances. Of course, the Republican majority in the Congress has been so cowardly. They're frightened as hell of Trump. And he says jump. And they say, yes, sir, how high? And I think that that's changing, as I said earlier. And I think we may soon face a new political reality in the US. And we are seeing that through a geopolitical lens. So all these three countries, Brazil, Colombia, and India, have now done so and got closer to the China orbit. India and China share a border. They've had tense relationships. And there's been a detente because of what's happening from the White House. China, as you know, and numbers you have cited from Bloomberg reporting, which is now, if you look at exports from fossil fuels in the US, and they'll count them in billions of dollars. And then you take exports of clean energy technologies from China in billions of dollars. China is ahead. Yeah, China is exporting goods in the green tech sector with a higher value than the US is exporting with all of the fossil fuel, all the LNG, the coal, the oil, the gas. And clearly, clean technology is the future. There's really no argument, no reasonable argument against that. So Trump is shooting the US in both feet, really hobbling the US ability to compete in the leading economic sector of the 21st century. And it's really a tragedy. It can be reversed, but it will take time to reverse it. Join us after the break for more of my conversation with Al Gore, former vice president of the United States. 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Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts who are all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. How worried are you that now more and more countries are going into the China orbit? I gave you three examples. There are more examples I can pull off. Kenya, for example, recently reoriented its dollar bond into a yuan bond. Why? Because it's got lower interest rates from China. And anyway, it wants to import goods from China that are going to help it build clean energy. Sitting as vice president two decades ago, China was seen as a scare for the Western order. Does that not worry you now? Yeah, I think it does worry me. And I do agree that one of the many consequences of Trump's mismanagement of America's destiny is that it gives China advantages that it has not earned on its own. I do think that what I said earlier applies, and that is that over time, I think nations around the world are going to be reluctant to follow China. You use the example of Kenya. There's a history there of China acting like a loan shark in Kenya. And throughout many parts of Africa, there are these predatory and abusive loan provisions where they collect the collateral and end up owning the railroad and owning the port and so forth. So there is building resistance. But that's a time when the US should take advantage of that rather than pushing nations toward China. Coming to US competitiveness, a lot of conversation has happened this year on how much AI and data centers are consuming electricity and how much more electricity the world is going to have to produce and how difficult it is to be able to build any electricity supply in the US. Now, we are talking about an increase of 1% in the past to 2%, maybe 3%, maybe 4%, which seems large. Now, China or India are building electricity infrastructure at 10% growth every year. When the White House is so keen on making sure no clean energy technologies get a foothold in America, Donald Trump, as you said, is going to leave the White House at some point. What happens when the next president comes in and wants to get back into the electricity game? What does the lost years of Trump do to US competitiveness on electricity? Well, first of all, there are a lot of things I want to say in response to that. And first of all, I think that the electricity demand growth associated with the generative AI data centers is cause for concern, but not panic. Some people seem to be using it as the leading edge of a wedge to say, see, this is why we have to stop worrying about climate because we need all this energy for generative AI, and we can't get chat GPT-10 if we don't really bust all the emissions budgets. I think this story is still unfolding. There's a lot we have yet to see on the generative AI story. And many of the power users, the hyperscalers, as they're called, are also consumer-facing companies that actually do still care a lot about how their consumers view their approach to climate. And many of them are now trying to invest in much larger solar-plus batteries facilities for power. Some of them are using some novel techniques that are going to try to avoid the emissions. Not all, unfortunately. There is some increase in emissions, for sure. But it's not a cause for panic. Let me give you an example. I know we're going to talk about climate trace later. But some of our data at Climate Trace shows, for example, that you can take all of the generative AI data centers, and the total emissions are not bigger than those from uncovered landfills around the world. I mean, it's not a high-tech challenge to cover a damn landfill. There are local materials. People are shovel-ready, create jobs. There are many other examples of how we can compensate for the increased emissions from these AI data centers. Also, the deep-seek model in China looks like there's growing appeal to the open-source models rather than what open AI and Google and the others are offering in the US. So this story is still unfolding. It certainly is. And it's good to have numbers in front of us, because you talked a little bit about emissions. But if you just take energy use between 2025 and 2035, if you look at where electricity consumption is going to rise, if AI is one unit, air conditioning is twice as much, industry is four times as much. So we do have an energy equation where more and more of our lives are getting electrified. That's actually a good thing, because it's much more efficient. Electrify everything in, quote, it has been one of the pillars of the climate response strategy. I totally agree. But it's also the competitiveness edge now you will have over other countries. And so coming back to the US, where you need to be able to compete on a global stage on electricity technologies, but the US is right now not just not part of the game, it is actively pulling itself out of the race to try and electrify the economy to build the electricity industries. Well, the Trump administration may be doing that, but American business is not doing that. You know, the clean tech spending has increased quite dramatically in the nine months since Trump has been in office. The first time he was president, he tried the same thing. And during those four years, solar doubled, EVs doubled, clean tech investment doubled, fossil went down, because of this big wheel turning. I also want to point out, before we pass away from the AI discussion, that it's very real that AI is going to provide some ways to reduce emissions that were not accessible and available to us in the past. Whether it's a bubble or not, I'm not qualified to say I'm not a macroeconomic economist. I don't hold myself out as an expert in macro. But there is a discussion about a bubble. Maybe it's not. And of course, there's history that some bubbles end up being useful after the first users pass away, then the next find them valuable. And I think that the US is hurting itself tremendously. But I think that the momentum in the private sector is still going to keep the US in that game very much. Outside the US, we are already seeing lots of right-wing parties taking either the stunts that Donald Trump takes or start to break down on climate consensus. So I live in the UK. The UK, as you know, has been a climate leader. It had a cross-party support for climate consensus. That's now starting to break down. The opposition party conservatives want to get rid of the Climate Change Act, for example. The same thing is happening in Australia right now. Just this week, we've been told that the opposition party, if it comes to power, they could reverse the climate goals that Australia has set. And we are seeing this happening in Europe and many other parts. One thing that the climate community has done over the past 10 years out of necessity is to try to specialize in the many, many, many sectors that we need to decarbonize, to put rules, to put targets, to try and figure out the technological solutions, the policy solutions. But in the process, there has been a gap. How do you get the public to know what you're doing is actually in their benefit? And right now, they are not seeing it. And that's why they are willing to vote for parties that would bring down climate policies, even if that harms them. So what is a new pact? How do you make a new pact with the public to see that climate action is in their benefit? Well, first of all, if I may quote Abraham Lincoln, he said, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible." Having a clear process for reasoning together collectively and lifting up what is in the best interest of the public is the policy solution for this policy crisis. We really have to fight back against this. There's an elite project, for example, to buy up mainstream media outlets. The autocrats and the Brogards and the Petro States are trying to buy up access to communications. We have to fight against that. And the role of these predatory and abusive algorithms that direct attention flows on the internet really has to be addressed. Now, it's beginning to be addressed. But these algorithms that create the rabbit holes that people are sucked down into, they're creating a social crisis, or particularly among young men and young women around the world. And now they layered on top of it these AI companions that sometimes aid in a bit suicidal tendencies. And there are many other abuses. They pull people down these rabbit holes. You know what's at the bottom of the rabbit hole? That's where the echo chamber is. And if you spend too much time in the echo chamber, you become vulnerable to a new kind of AI, artificial insanity. And that's where climate denial and the Flat Earth Society and QAnon and all this wacky stuff, you attributed the popularity of some of these right of center populist movements to failures in implementation of climate solutions. I think that's partly true, in my opinion. I think there's a lot else that needs to be put into that equation. We had the pandemic. We had the sadistic Russian invasion of Ukraine, which completely upended a lot of the energy supply chains. We've had hyper-globalization since China joined the WTO at the beginning of this millennium with the centrifugal redistribution of high-wage jobs to low-wage venues. And so in the wealthier countries, when publics are saying, you know, we need to give more foreign aid to these countries where a lot of manufacturing jobs have just been sent, it's not sustainable politically. So there are many factors involved. As our case is new, we must think anew. But one of our priorities has to be to listen to what President Lula is saying about this COP. This must be the truth COP. And I think in COPs going forward, we have to pay careful attention to this asymmetry of information because it deeply affects the formation of public sentiment in favor of what we have to do. Now, I do think that there were specific failures in the US in the too slow implementation of the IRA, the big climate law that passed early in Biden's term. And people didn't see the installation. And by the time it was beginning, then, you know, there was no way to use the examples that people had hoped would be there. So that is definitely a part of the problem. And one other thing, the whole COP process in a way is shifting toward implementation. And so I think that we really do need to focus on implementing the right policies in a very practical, effective way. Thank you for listening to Zero. The second part of my interview with Al Gore will come out on Thursday this week. So subscribe to Zero to get it straight in your podcast feed. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd with the help from the team at Ted Countdown House. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly. Special thanks to Somersadi, Moses Andam, Laura Milan, and Sharon Chen. I am Akshathrati, back soon.