Al Gore Lost His S*** at the Economic Forum in Davos

And for it, he deserves another Nobel Peace prize

If you haven’t seen Gore’s outburst on the stage during the “Leading the Charge Through Earth’s New Normal” panel discussion at the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Annual Meeting, then I highly recommend you watch it.

Love or hate him, the man has more passion concerning the changing climate than probably most of us combined. I have been a Gore fan since reading about him in a Mother Jones article in 1988. I also think I am one of the few people who understood what he meant when he said he “took initiative in Congress that created the internet.”

Without Gore’s leadership in Congress on the technology that supported the internet, it might not have been created when it was — he has been a visionary his whole life, and the world is a better place thanks to him. The way he handled the 2000 election was remarkable now that we have seen what could have been had he refused to concede.

But let’s get back to his moment in Davos. First, I think the former vice president has an issue with his hearing because he speaks very loudly. The man does not need a microphone, which made his 10-minute recitation of just how bad things are in the battle to mitigate the adverse effects of the changing climate that much more “in our face.”

Gored — With environmental risks taking the top slots in the World Economic Forum’s 2023 risk report, it was inevitable that efforts to tackle climate and nature risks would play a leading role at Davos this week. Some were shocked by the anger expressed at the forum by ex-US VP Al Gore, who distanced himself from US Climate Envoy John Kerry on the growing role of petrostates and oil company executives in climate change negotiations. Already under pressure to reform, the World Bank also felt Gore’s fury for “completely failing to do its job” in enabling climate finance flows, including de-risking for private investors (Shock and Gore at Davos).

As I watched Gore rip through numbers that none of us ever hear about concerning troposphere thickness and annual ice cap melt, all of which helped him better support the nightmarish scenarios he was drawing in front of our eyes, there was one that caught my attention and honestly scared the hell out of me.

Gore said that if we keep going the way we are, pretending to be doing things like meeting at the annual Conventions on Climate Change (COP) — which he said were a goddamn joke — then there will be one billion climate refugees by the end of this century.

And then, dropping in a fact hidden in a supporting clause, he said, “Look how just a few million refugees over this past decade has sent our politics to rightist extremes.” He asked, “What will one billion do to our politics?”

That is indeed a terrifying thought. That is the scariest thought of them all, and I immediately began thinking how I wanted to find some survivor’s camp and move my family there.

Let’s forget about everything else, though. Let’s set aside numbers like average temperatures and average rainfall predictions. Gore’s inner wonk monster can never resist boring people with numbers that only he and climate geeks find so tantalizing. Climate-change deniers, like the entirety of the Republican Party and all Murdoch publications, love it when he makes such precise predictions.

For example, Gore says with his usual fury and emotion: “Temperatures will go up by 2 degrees Celsius by 2020.” But then it turns out they only went by 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2020. This gives the climate-change deniers the necessary fuel to show that Gore is just some tree-hugging nut job and cannot be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, the problems are real; the temperatures are still rising, and all of the reasons this is happening are still in place. Returning to Gore’s prediction of one billion refugees by the end of the century, if he is off by 50 percent, even 70 percent, we still have one of the biggest human catastrophes ever.

That will still mean 300 million people are on the move — desperate, hungry, and willing to do anything for stability; and, there will be billions more inclined to do anything to keep those people out of their countries. This is a recipe for a Mad Max and the Thunderdome sequel.

Much of the world’s press has been everything but praising Gore for his conciseness and bravery. The right has not been so much as critical as it has just mocked him.

The world’s powers-that-be sensed a lack of decorum in his outburst from one of their own. Gore was sparing no one’s feelings, and his social calendar will surely be a little light in 2023. One personwill be looking to hang with the man I consider one of the brightest and most practical of our times. Greta Thunberg was praised by the former vice president — and should have been president in 2000.

The most extreme symbol of the current failure, he said, is the appointment of the boss of the oil company of the United Arab Emirates as president of COP28, the next United Nations conference on climate change, which will be held in December. “We cannot let the oil companies and gas companies and petrostates tell us what is permissible,” he said vehemently. He believes the time to act is now. He was given a standing ovation, especially by younger members of the audience (Gore Launches an Attack).

Al Gore’s comments will become historic for young people and people like me. I sat in awe as I listened to him mercilessly trashing the entire Potemkin’s Village that the battle against climate change has become. Maybe he hoped to be appointed the president of COP28, or perhaps he is just sick of the hypocrisy like so many of us regular people.

Al Gore is not one of us; the regular people and his angry words can go a long way. They can and will, be heard in many board rooms in the “civilized” world.

As Al worked his way down the busy, pre-cocktail party crowds on the Promenade in Davos, I am sure that many people under 40 were congratulating him. I am also sure that many people over 40, the primary recipients of much of the world’s wealth, were looking warily at him.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Perhaps fear and discomfort will motivate them to end the charade. (Please watch his history-making comments here.)