GENEVA (AN) — Former U.S. vice president Al Gore says Donald Trump's incoming Republican administration probably won't be able to undo the Democrats' landmark climate law because of hundreds of billions of dollars in announced manufacturing projects across the United States.
On his way to the COP29 climate summit, Gore told a packed auditorium at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, on Friday that President Joe Biden's signature 2022 climate legislation should be safe due to those investments, which are expected to take hold during the next Trump administration and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
"I'm not going to try and talk about the election this week in the U.S. It needs analysis, for sure. But I want to make one point about it," he said of Trump, a climate change denier, after Tuesday's presidential election.
"It is unlikely, in my opinion, that the new president will be able to reverse this historic legislation and pause the money already spent that's created tens of thousands of jobs, and is becoming popular. I hope I'm not wrong about that. There's a lot that we have to give some thought to in the U.S."
The Biden White House said in August 2023, a year after the law known as the Inflation Reduction Act was signed, that it already is having "a significant impact on American workers and families, and is delivering for underserved communities and those that have been too often left behind."
The biggest climate bill in U.S. history sparked strong growth in batteries, electric vehicles and solar panels, and provided communities around the country with billion of dollars to protect against impacts of climate change.
'We don't have time for despair'
More than four decades since he held what may have been the first congressional hearing on human-caused climate change in 1981, Gore is still spearheading the global resistance to the fossil fuel-based status quo.
He'll take part in the U.N.'s COP29 climate summit that starts next week in Baku, Azerbaijan, the first oil-producing country in the world. As the world's first oil town, Baku had pioneering wells for "black gold" in the 1840s and refineries a decade later. Fossil fuels now make up 90% of the nation's exports. "If that's a good place for a climate conference, I don't know," Gore half-joked.
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, which committed all the world's nations to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emission by mid-century, the 60 largest global banks have provided an additional US$6.9 trillion in fossil fuel financing, Gore said, and that is one of the biggest obstacles to fighting global warming.
By removing fossil fuel subsidies, he said, 1.6 million lives a year would be saved and carbon emissions would fall 34% below 2019 levels by 2030; government revenues also would rise by US$4.4 trillion.
And once the world reached net zero CO₂ emissions, global temperatures will stop increasing in as soon as three to five years, according to American climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann.
Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate treaty less than six months into his first presidency; Biden reversed the move. Trump is likely to repeat that, but Gore pointed out that 81% of global emissions come from countries that have set net zero targets.
With Trump's authoritarian tendencies in focus, Gore also warned about the rise of authoritarianism – and that people need to be wary of being told the opposite of what science tells us.
"Just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource," he said. "We don't have time for despair. This is a time when we all have to face up to our responsibilities."
