Former VP Al Gore: A clean Earth is within world's grasp even as climate dangers accelerate

NEW YORK (AP) — Longtime climate warrior Al Gore sees victory within Earth’s grasp. But he worries that it could still slip through humanity’s fingers. “While we’re in grave danger, but I think there is a possibility that 2026 will be looked back upon in the history books as the beginning of a positive tipping point,” Gore said in a sit down interview with The Associated Press during New York Climate Week.

He sees a good chance the world is peaking its use of coal, oil and gas, which cause global warming, as solar and other renewable power is overtaking dirtier fossil fuels. He compared the effort to make a cleaner world to the U.S. civil rights movement, Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid movement and women’s equality efforts as “the other great morally based challenges that humanity has confronted in the past.

“And in all of those prior movements,” he said, “there were times when the advocates felt despair but they kept going because courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the determination to go forward in spite of it.” Nature makes him nervous because Earth’s warming is accelerating and with it extreme weather, such as heat waves and the deadly glacier collapse and flooding that killed 1,300 people in Nepal. “I’m temperamentally optimistic, but the dangers are extremely grave, getting more so all the time,” said, Gore, often accused of being a doomsayer by nonscientist political opponents. “We’re seeing these extreme events come fast and furious.

They’re worse as well as more frequent. … It’s like a nature hike through the book of Revelation.” A race between old and new power “This is a close race between the unfathomable risk we are taking, the unacceptable damages we are enduring on one hand, and the incredibly exciting advance of all the clean, cheap, job-producing alternatives that people not under the sway of the fossil fuel industry are adopting in droves,” Gore said. He ticked off factoids such as Africa installing 100,000 solar panels per day, that 91% of the new U.S.

electricity generation was renewable and that 30% of all new car s sold globally this year will be electric. And, he said, in Pakistan the common dowry now includes three solar panels. “The answer is in our hands,” Gore said.

“The last chapter of this story won’t come for a while, but I think we really are a… But he worries that it could still slip through humanity's fingers.“While we're in grave danger, but I think there is a possibility that 2026 will be looked back upon in the history books as the beginning of a positive tipping point,” Gore said in a sit down interview with The Associated Press during New York Climate Week.