Al Gore: America Is Close to a ‘Political Tipping Point’ on Climate Change

The former vice president discusses how the politics of the environment have changed considerably over his decades of advocacy.

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
JAN 3, 2019

Al Gore is mostly done with politics these days. Though he popped up at a campaign stop with Hillary Clinton in 2016, he’s otherwise safely in the very small group of nationally known Democrats not thinking of running for president in 2020.

But Gore remains engaged on his signature policy issue: climate change, for which the national political conversation is just starting to catch up to his warnings from decades ago. While he was a senator, through his eight years as vice president, and during his 2000 presidential campaign, Gore was tagged on the campaign trail as a global-warning alarmist obsessed with data and far-off predictions. Now, between the growing support for the Green New Deal in Congress and the presidential candidates railing against climate change, the Democratic Party has made aggressive action central to its developing identity.

The former vice president, who’s won an Oscar for his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental advocacy, speaks often at United Nations and other international meetings on climate change, events that some American officials and other prominent figures continue to attend despite President Donald Trump’s decision to stop sending official representatives on behalf of his administration.