Usually, climate change activists use melting ice as a sign of approaching trouble. Not Al Gore.
Speaking to more than a thousand people—packed into UVM’s Ira Allen Chapel and watching remotely at Mann Hall—the former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner took the opposite metaphor. “It’s just one degree of difference between water and ice,” he said—and the same is true of markets, he said. The cost of solar panels, advanced batteries, and other renewable-energy technologies has reached a melting point, Gore said, where they are becoming cheaper than fossil fuels.
“The difference between ‘more expensive than’ and ‘cheaper than’ is markets that are frozen up and markets that are liquid with investments flowing toward the new, more attractive alternative,” Gore said on Tuesday morning.
And in that fundamental shift in economics, Gore told his audience, there is cause for hope about solving the problems of global warming.
Not a sewer
Gore’s lecture at UVM, “The Climate Crisis and The Case for Hope,” was hosted by the Burlington-based company Seventh Generation and the University of Vermont’s Energy Action Seminar and Clean Energy Fund.
This is a newfound optimism from Gore, chairman of the Climate Reality Project—and sometimes called “the prophet of doom.” And, typical of his famous prove-it-with-slides approach, he brought a wealth of data and images to three large screens in the UVM chapel—to show why his outlook on global warming has become sunnier than it was in 2007. That was the year the chilling documentary about Gore’s work, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award and two Oscars.
First, Gore made the case for how serious the climate crisis is now. Showing harrowing video footage from around the world, he noted that fourteen of the hottest years ever measured have been in the last fifteen years; in Japan, there has been all-time record flooding; in South Carolina, the recent rains created a 1,000-year flood; in South Africa, there has been one of the worst droughts in history. And in California, “the snow pack is officially zero percent of normal,” Gore said, while in the Syrian civil war “climate-related extreme drought was the fuse that touched off the explosion.”
The atmosphere that sustains all life is very thin, and we have to stop treating it “like an open sewer,” Gore said, noting that humanity dumps “110 million tons of heat-trapping pollution into that space” every day.
Against that dire data, Gore painted a picture of rapid, “leapfrogging changes” in green energy development. “Just fifteen years ago, the leading experts said that by 2010, we'll get 30 gigawatts of wind capacity,” he said, but “we've beaten that estimate by 12 times over.” Now there are “enough wind mills in aggregate to power every home in the State of California,” he said, and “we're seeing green bonds increase fifteen-fold just in the last three years.”
Even though wind and solar are still a small slice of the energy market, the trend is very favorable, Gore said: “more than three-quarters of all the new generating capacity is solar, wind, and renewables.” Then he pointed to a hair-thin line on his pie chart. “That’s new coal. I can’t even seen the coal line, but it’s .0005%.”
While capital markets move investments toward renewable energy, “we really do need to put a price on carbon,” Gore urged. “And in order to put a price on carbon, we have to put a price on denial in the political system,” he said to loud cheering.
Millennial hopes
After his talk, Gore fielded a question from Gina Fiorile ‘18, a UVM environmental studies major and recent guest at the White House, honored for her climate change work: what successful actions are students taking around the world to combat climate change?
Your millennial generation, Gore replied, “is not just a little bit different from attitudes from my generation and others. It's a lot different. And I think it's partly because you've grown up with a clear-eyed view of what's happening in the world.”
“Students are really leading the way all over the world,” Gore said. “Every great social movement has had an overrepresentation of young people who have this clear view of what's at stake.”
Which, in their own way, 24 fourth- and fifth-grade students from Burlington’s Sustainability Academy demonstrated. Sitting near the front row with their teachers and principal, they had been preparing for Gore’s visit for days, reading from the youth edition of his book.
“I’m very interested in climate change because our world is getting warmer everyday and we have to fix it,” said fifth-grader Sophie Richardson-Shepard. “Al Gore will give us some good ideas.” Asked who Al Gore is, she smiled, “I don’t know very much about him, but I know he was very close to being president.”