Al Gore rallies S.F. climate conference crowd with fiery anti-Trump keynote

Former Vice President Al Gore warned a crowd in San Francisco on Monday that the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle climate policy are an existential threat to humanity and called on Americans to briskly and boldly resist.

In a fiery speech that was quintessential Gore, the 77-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner harkened back to his early career as a pioneer of climate activism and spelled out how greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere and causing disaster for ecosystems, world markets and human health.

“Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn would be hell on earth in order to preserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry?” he said.

Gore spoke during the opening reception of San Francisco Climate Week. He delivered the keynote address to an invitation-only audience of a couple hundred people at the Exploratorium on the Embarcadero. 

His message comes at a fraught moment for the climate movement. While climate action in California and elsewhere has benefited from four years of unprecedented federal investment under the Biden administration, President Donald Trump has dramatically changed the trajectory.

During his first three months in office, Trump has sought to gut greenhouse gas regulations and clean-energy initiatives, promising a boom in oil and gas and production. The president sees fossil fuel development as vital to keeping electricity cheap, creating jobs and reducing America’s foreign energy reliance, even as scientists blame it for driving historic levels of heat and causing havoc to weather systems.

“The new Trump administration is trying to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future,” Gore said to the very friendly and often cheering congregation.

As much as any particular policy, Gore said the real danger is the president’s disposition for telling mistruths and spreading propaganda. Encouraging people to believe that climate change is a hoax and that oil and gas companies are enterprises worthy of support, he said, threatens to unravel public support and decades of climate progress.

“The trust market has crashed,” Gore said. “The market for democracy has taken a major hit.”

Still, Gore said he is holding out hope for the climate movement and encouraged individuals, businesses and communities to come together to support lifestyles, policies and technology that can help put a lid on global warming.

The planet, which has been heating up increasingly since the late 1800s, has recently flirted with the 1.5-degree rise in temperature (Celsius) that scientists say is calamitous. Already, the heat is contributing to wildfires, melting snow cover, more hurricanes and floods and sea level rise.

“The solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week in San Francisco,” he said.

San Francisco Climate Week is billed as an exchange of ideas on how to address climate change. Several talks, panels and social events are scheduled through Sunday. The event is put on by the nonprofit Climatebase, a climate networking organization, in collaboration with the city and partnering groups. This year marks the event’s third year and is expected to draw more than 25,000 across its more than 600 events, according to organizers.

In a biting caveat to his message of “all hands on deck” climate action, Gore signaled hostility toward a set of climate technologies that some conference participants are working to advance: “giant mechanical vacuums,” or direct air capture, a nascent technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Gore called such technologies “ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical” and warned that they could be co-opted by fossil fuel interests as “bright, shiny objects” to distract from the need to phase out oil and gas production.

Gore, 77, served as vice president from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 2000 but lost the general election to Republican George W. Bush.

Climate change was a foremost issue in Gore’s political career, and advocating for solutions became his livelihood after leaving office. He is cofounder and chairman of the sustainable investment firm Generation Investment Management and founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit that works on climate issues. Gore’s climate work was documented in the Oscar-winning film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Speaking after Gore, U.S. Rep. and House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi called the former vice president’s speech a “tour de force” and reassured the audience that agitation can move the political needle.

“This community, with its mobilization, with its impatience with the status quo, was what made us form the [Select Committee on the Climate Crisis],” Pelosi said. She encouraged attendees to continue advocating under the Trump administration. “This is as urgent as it comes.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie welcomed conference participants to “the greatest city in the world” and said his administration is committed to meeting San Francisco’s sustainability goals.

Lurie also said he intends to make San Francisco “the place to be for climate innovation.” He said he spoke to 10 climate entrepreneurs earlier that day and told them, “‘It is a new day in San Francisco. We want to work with you, we want you here, and this is the greatest city in climate tech.’”