Al Gore: Action on climate is 'unstoppable', despite recent shifts in US policy

“A lot of the decisions that affect global warming pollution emissions are not down to what the federal government in the US does.”

That is Al Gore’s assessment of the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s notice to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum's 2025 Annual Meeting, the former US vice-president and climate campaigner told Radio Davos why he thinks momentum on climate action is unstoppable, how measuring emissions is key to managing them, and what he thinks will happen next.

Here are the key points of what he had to say.

One of Trump’s first acts after his inauguration was to sign a letter giving the United Nations notice that the US was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement – having already done so once before during his first term as US president. However, Gore doesn’t think this move will have as much impact on global climate action as some fear.

But "Governors and mayors and business leaders are, for the most part, going to continue reducing their emissions because it makes good economic sense,” he says

Organizations, too, are also likely to keep their eye on the prize as they will also want to keep hiring the best and brightest employees and climate is very much a top priority for a next-generation workforce, he adds. “Young people, in particular, nowadays often don’t want to work for a company that doesn’t share their values, especially on an issue as important as the climate crisis, which has an impact on the future of human civilization.”

When asked about the current momentum of climate action, even after Trump’s decision, Gore is clear: “I think it is unstoppable.”

The fossil fuel sector has three markets, he explains – electricity generation, which predominantly burns oil and gas; mobility or transportation, which relies on liquid fuels; and petrochemicals, 75% of which is plastics.

The sector is already losing the first two markets, Gore says, with the vast majority of new electricity generation installed worldwide last year made up of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles gaining market share. Meanwhile, consumer concerns about the environmental and health dangers of microplastics are significantly impacting the third.

“So I think the die is cast; the writing is on the wall. We’re going to make this transition and we’re going to solve the climate crisis. The remaining question, however, is how quickly will we do it?”

Gore believes that fossil fuel companies are slowly but surely losing the argument when it comes to climate, especially when it comes to younger generations.

“Fossil fuel companies, which as I’ve said, have the most powerful lobby in history, are trying to slow down this transition and they finance a lot of climate deniers that put false information out. But they’re losing their ability to dominate there,” he explains

“Unfortunately, they’re way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions, and they have a lot of politicians that do whatever they tell them to do. But young people are entering the ranks of those who vote in elections, and we’re seeing the beginnings of a real change in the political systems approach to this crisis also.”

The fact that scientists have been “spot on” with their forecasts about the impact of climate change – an argument that Gore has been making for years, most notably in the 2006 book and documentary An Inconvenient Truth – should give us pause to reflect.

“Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” he says. “The climate-related disasters all over the world are becoming far more frequent and far more serious and deadly. And Mother Nature is a far better advocate than I am, or that any of the climate activists are. And these events are persuading people.”

“There’s an old saying in business that you can only manage what you measure,” says Gore. Indeed, that is the driving principle behind Climate TRACE, an independent tracker of global emissions he co-founded that will soon accelerate its reports from annual to monthly.

“This is a coalition of 13 artificial intelligence organizations combined with 160 data contributors, some of the greatest scientists in the world who have combined their efforts to precisely identify the 660 million sources of the global warming pollution everywhere in the world,” he explains.

“We have every nation, every state or province, every country, the 9,000 largest cities in the world, every sector and subsector of the economy. And we can show you very precisely where it’s coming from.”

From March, every country in the world will have its scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions monitored. CLIMATE Trace is also adding particulate pollution – the inhalation of which kills 8.7 million people worldwide each year – to its monitoring in a bid to drive climate action.

“The alliance between the health community, the environmental justice community and the climate community will be a very powerful alliance to accelerate the sharp reduction of greenhouse gases,” he believes.

Climate TRACE’s monitoring is enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), which receives and analyses data from 300 satellites and 30,000 land, sea and air based sensors every hour – meaning emissions are tracked in unprecedented detail. In addition, some CEOs are privately offering their own self-monitored data, which is used to check accuracy.

Most importantly, these insights can then be translated into action. Climate TRACE data, for example, was used to identify the world’s 100 most problematic landfills after it was revealed that the greenhouse gas pollution from rubbish dumps is 14 times higher than for all the AI data centres around the world.

As covering landfills with sand or dirt can lead to a 70% in emissions, doing so offers a relatively low-cost and low-tech solution that will have a “tremendous impact” in reducing global warming pollution.

Looking to the future, Gove believes that solving the climate crisis will be key to tackling many of today’s greatest challenges.

“The most important solution is to phase out the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. It will have solutions to the health crisis. Solutions to the climate crisis. Solutions to the unemployment crisis that many countries fear they're facing. So I think that's the top priority – to phase out global warming pollution by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and the other technologies that are now available,” he says.

As the recent devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and other climate-related disasters have highlighted, “Mother Nature is providing a good bit of urgency when people suffer these terrible consequences and the risk we’re running is just too high”.

However, there is, of course, another reason that climate action should be a priority. “And that is it creates three times as many good new jobs as would be created by the same amount of money invested in the old dirty fossil fuel economy,” he explains.

“So if you’re creating millions of new jobs, cleaning up the air, improving health outcomes and saving the future of humanity, that’s a pretty good deal.”

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