Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore used a sobering analogy to explain why climate change is driving natural disasters around the world.
“We’re putting 162 million tons of manmade global warming pollution into that part of the sky that’s blue, it’s only five to seven kilometers thick. It’s a very thin shell. And 162 million tons every day added. It lingers there on average, each molecule about 100 years,” Gore said Monday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah. “So it builds up and it traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class, atomic bombs exploding on the Earth every day.”
In an interview with Fortune’s Jessica Matthews, Gore discussed potential solutions and his opinion of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Watch the video above or read the full transcript below.
Fortune: So now that we’ve discussed the business climate here in Utah, let’s talk about the meteorological climate worldwide and the role tech could play in helping humanity respond to the biggest challenge in our lifetime. Here in Utah, the Great Salt Lake remains at low levels. In New York last night, there were catastrophic floods 20 miles north of the city. We had orange skies for a day because of Canadian wildfires a month ago, record heat in Europe, snow fields in Switzerland disappearing, so there’s no denying that climate change is real and changing our lives.
In 2022, the U.S. alone experienced 18 separate weather and climate disasters, which each cost the economy at least $1 billion each. And total wild weather should be costing the economy $165 billion this year. And so far, the first half of the year has been pretty terrible in terms of weather catastrophes. So this is where tech will step in, hopefully. The climate tech market is expected to grow to $417 billion by 2030. And it’s imperative that this tech actually lead to solutions, tangible, so we can fix this. So to introduce one of our panelists, we have a climate message pioneer, former U.S. Vice President and co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm that is focused on finding a new approach to sustainable investing. It’s a great honor to welcome Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, he’s joined by his colleague Lila Preston Generation’s head of growth equity, interviewing Mr. Gore and Miss Preston on the new green frontier is my colleague Fortune’s Jessica Matthews.
Jessica Mathews: We felt that we could not host a tech conference in Park City without inviting the man who created the internet, former Vice President Al Gore. No, but in all seriousness, Mr. Gore, you did play a very important role in incorporating computers into the government and making the internet and databases more widely accessible. You for decades said technology has an important role to play in improving our lives and our planet. What would you say is the tech sector’s role in tackling climate crisis?
Al Gore: Well, first of all, Jessica, thank you for interviewing us today. I’m here with my colleague, Lila Preston, we’re partners in Generation Investment Management. And the question you’ve asked, how does technology help to solve the climate crisis in multiple ways, we have seen some rather stunning cost reduction curves that have been highlighted in solar electricity, wind electricity, batteries, electric vehicles. All kinds of other less well known but extremely significant technologies have been coming down in cost quite dramatically. And now with machine learning and artificial intelligence, including generative A.I., even blockchain and some of the other information technologies, we’re seeing the emergence of a sustainability revolution, which we had at Generation believe has the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. A lot of business executive teams are now acquiring the ability to manage electrons and protons and atoms and molecules and genes and peptides and proteins with the same proficiency that the IT companies have long since demonstrated in managing bits. And as a result, we’re seeing these stunning Wright’s Law curves, some of them quite steep, not as steep as Moore’s law, but some of them even more so on generative A.I. for example. But this is opening up profit-making opportunities in the transition to sustainability. Because we’ve got to stop using the sky as an open sewer. And I think more and more people are coming to that realization. This week has seen record temperatures around the world. We’ve seen the smoke cover the northern tier of American cities from the Canadian fires at both ends of the earth. North Sea temperatures are literally off the charts this year. And at the Antarctica the sea ice is off the charts low. There are many, many other examples. Today, the downpours in upstate New York flooding people out of their homes. Same thing happening simultaneously in Tokyo.
Jessica Mathews : We’ve had a few people that had flight issues coming in from New York, because flooding.
Al Gore: So every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation. And people are beginning to realize in greater numbers that we’ve got, we’ve got to fix this. We’re putting 162 million tons of manmade global warming pollution into that part of the sky that’s blue, it’s only five to seven kilometers thick. It’s a very thin shell. And 162 million tons every day added. It lingers there on average, each molecule about 100 years. So it builds up and it traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class, atomic bombs exploding on the Earth every day. This is insane. And we have to stop it. The good news is that largely because of improvements in technology, particularly information technology, we have seen the emergence of new sustainable approaches that are cheaper, cleaner, better, in every single way.
Jessica Mathews: And can I ask you about that. So Generation has more than $31 billion in assets under management, which makes you one of the largest investment firms focused on sustainability. So I want to
Al Gore: Forty five, but I don’t want to quibble.
Jessica Mathews: Assets under management specifically.
Al Gore: Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m familiar with the term.
Jessica Mathews: How do you as measure as a firm whether a company will make the world cleaner, safer, more equitable?
Lila Preston: Yeah, so we start from a research perspective, we go very deep into how pockets of different sectors are shifting towards more sustainable, more sustainable future. And sometimes that’s from cost down curves. It’s from consumer demand shifts, it’s from policy and regulation changes. And ultimately, these roadmaps help us determine what a sustainable company looks like, whether it’s in the area of planetary health, people health or financial inclusion. So we are tracking, you know, from the bottoms up, what are the types of business models we want to get to build relationships with. And it’s a pretty concentrated strategy I sit as the head of a growth fund. But Generation as a firm does private as well as public investing. And so we have a pretty concentrated set of relationships to try to understand how these companies are not just thriving in the transition to a sustainable future, but also driving that transition. And so that’s what we’re looking at. And actually remember when I first joined Generation, which was back in 2005, working with Al on our systems lens, we call this system positive, you know, what are the shifts around climate science? What are the shifts related to demographic changes, urbanization, water scarcity, pandemics. Actually stitching this together, so that we understand that these are all connected topics. And in fact, if you’re not understanding those layers, add in generative A.I. add in, you know, diverse organizations, like if you don’t understand how these come together, in not just what a company does, but how a company operates, you’re likely not going to deliver optimal performance.
Jessica Mathews: Mr. Gore, I want to turn back to you. I’m hoping you can weigh in on the Biden administration’s approach to addressing climate change. Last month in Palo Alto, President Biden said his administration is taking quote, unquote, the most aggressive climate action ever. Would you agree with that?
Al Gore: Yes, I would. And first of all,let me let me apologize for correcting you on that earlier number. It’s a very common misperception because we have two headquarters in London and in San Francisco, and sometimes the reporting systems just do have a portion of it. But yes, on the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act is principally a climate law. And it was depicted as allocating $369 billion to green technologies and the climate transition. Actually, the heavy lifting is done by tax credits. There are a lot of people here know all about this. And most of these tax credits are open ended. Many of them have a 10-year limit, others are completely open ended, and the first eight months of applications now make it clear that this is going to be not $369 billion, but well over $1 trillion. Goldman Sachs estimates that at $1.2 trillion. It is indeed by far and away, the largest and most effective best-designed climate law that any nation has ever passed. There are some warts on it. From my point of view, there’s some things in it that I don’t like.
Jessica Mathews: What would you say are the warts?
Al Gore: Oh, well, you know, the really extravagant subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration. I understand totally. And I favor research to see if we can get some kind of breakthrough there. But in the political economy, the legacy power of the fossil fuel industry is largely responsible for driving the funneling of hundreds of billions into their chosen hobby horse. You know, I hope it eventually comes to work, but it’s kind of silly now. In heavy manufacturing some other applications, but to bolt one of these things on top of a coal burning power plant, it’s ridiculous, ridiculous. The moral hazard is a feature not a bug. They want the impression that this is going to make it possible to keep on burning more and more fossil fuels and just capture the emissions. You know, it all works. It’s just absurdly expensive. So that would be one of the warts. But back to my main narrative thread here. For each increased ton of emissions as a result of this law, there are 28 tons of decreased emissions. So in a representative democracy where compromise is almost always essential to do something big, that’s about as good a ratio of compromises, as you can imagine. So yes, President Biden and his team deserve a tremendous amount of credit for getting this done.
Jessica Mathews: I am going to open it up to and —
Al Gore: May I add one thing, within a month of the passage, Australia changed its government and began changing its policy. A month after that Brazil changed its government and began changing its policy. The EU withstood the blackmail attempts by Russia, and they have now accelerated their transition to renewable sustainability. So we have a lot of optimism, a basis for optimism, and a lot of momentum. But we are still seeing the crisis get worse faster than we are deploying the solutions that are available.
Jessica Mathews: I am going to open it up to audience questions in a minute. So if you have a question, go ahead and be thinking about it. Lila, I want to circle back to you. You oversee growth equity investments at Generation, how should startups and growth companies be thinking about both climate goals and also social and governance goals, particularly at this moment in time, where there’s a lot of pressure to improve your bottom line to become profitable?
Lila Preston: Yeah. So when I mentioned like looking for sustainable companies, we obviously put it in the context of again, the sector that they operate in, and what do they need to drive? Like, what are the products and services that that sector shift needs? But when you get to the company, we ask, well, what are you selling? And as you sell more of those units, your software, your services, what is the contribution that your company is making towards planetary health, people health, financial inclusion, or, more broadly, a sustainable, livable future? And I think that’s really motivating to have those kinds of types of conversation with mission-driven founders. Like, why are you here? Like, what are you driving for? And how will we know that you succeeded, you know, in five years, in 10 years, and so that’s sort of the impact of the products and services the what. But equally as important, and often I think this got forgotten in the first wave of kind of tech, is how do you operate? How do you build a sustainable organization beneath those products and services so that you can continue to pump them out, to drive revenue, and then ultimately pull through profits? And, importantly, this is where a whole toolkit related to sustainability is there to complement understanding your stakeholder engagement, understanding how you build inclusive and diverse cultures. How do you oversee responsible A.I., You know, the governance structures that you have in place as well. And so it’s just as important to think about the sustainability of the organization as much as the products and services that you sell. We help companies to calibrate, measure, benchmark and ultimately improve those what and how metrics over time. We share our reporting publicly. And we think it’s really empowering and exciting. There’s two companies here, we were speaking with earlier today, actually three companies, two in the circular economy – Vestiaire Collective and Back Market – who were both innovating in consumption to make reused, luxury in the case of Vestiaire or in the case of consumer electronics for Back Market, a more attractive value proposition. And actually us helping them with lifecycle assessment and they can quantify in the case of Vestiaire a 90% footprint reduction by purchasing reuse versus new, in the case of Back Market a cumulative emissions reduction of a million metric tons over the past 10 years. I mean, these are really important measurements that they can offer with a superior again, consumer experience for buying reuse. We also had Weka, who’s also here, that is untethering energy consumption from sort of data storage and infrastructure software. So this really important decoupling of energy use from the compute that is increasingly going to be in demand.
Jessica Mathews: I want to go ahead and open it up. Do we have any questions from the audience at this point? And just I ask, can you go ahead and stand up, state your name and the company work for and wait for one of the mic runners to come to you?
Audience Question: Oh, yeah. Thank you. My name is Mark Tullis. I’m founder of TechBuzz News here in Utah. I want to thank you for coming. And I have a question about your book, Inconvenient Truth. You actually signed a copy of it. Long time ago, when right when it came out. I was gonna bring it but you already have signed it. And so I don’t need to ask you. But I just wanted to ask you your thoughts about the significance of it? Over time now that there’s a few decades of, of time to think about it? How has it impacted your work, is it something you’re still building on? Is there something that you would revise? Or how does you feel like it holds up?
Al Gore: Well, I wish it hadn’t held up at all. I wish that the scientists whose insights and findings I was channeling in that book and movie, I wished they had been wrong. But unfortunately, they were were dead on. And because they were right, we should pay more attention to what they’re telling us now. They warned us of exactly the kinds of extreme climate-related events that we’re going through right now. And they’re warning us today that this is barely the beginning of what we and those to come after us would have to endure unless we stop this. They’re also telling us some good news, though. In the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ,the most recent IPCC report, there are two pieces of startlingly good news. First of all, if we get to true net zero, where there are no incremental additions to the greenhouse gas pollution burden, then the temperatures on earth will stop going up, just like that, with a lag of as little as three years. It it’s like flipping a switch. They used to think that we have already unleashed some positive feedback loops, that would continue, some things would continue, the ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, and the mountain glaciers would continue and some other things, but the temperature will stop going up. Second bit of good news. And this is really astonishing. If we get to true net zero, and stay there, half of all the human-caused co2 emissions will fall out of the atmosphere, into the upper ocean and the trees and vegetation in as little as 25 to 30 years. So if we decide to make a run for it, and let’s accelerate this transition, take all of the coal- burning plants that are no longer profitable to operate as they are, just replace them sooner rather than later – all due respect to their political power to snap their fingers and make the politicians do whatever the hell they tell them to do – but if we can somehow get over that burden, as we did with the passage of the IRA, and we accelerate this transition, if we stay at true net zero, and half of the human caused emissions come out, we would be down to 350 parts per million within 25 to 30 years, from 424 parts per million now. Translating that into the terms that we’re living with, that would mean fewer downpours, fewer record rain bombs and floods, fewer deep long-lasting droughts. We could slow the ice melt and sea-level rise and sharply reduce the 1 billion climate immigrants across national borders that are now projected for the balance of this century under business as usual. The world can’t handle that we’ve got to solve this and the good news is we can.
Jessica Mathews: With that I’m sorry but we are out of time thank you both so much for coming today.
