Climate champion and former Vice President Al Gore denounced Washington’s assault on climate policy and democratic norms Monday night at the start of San Francisco’s third annual Climate Week. During a keynote address at the city’s Exploratorium museum, Gore ripped into the alleged corruption and greed fueling the Trump administration and called its climate actions “an existential threat to humanity.”
Gore, the 77-year old former vice president won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work raising awareness of the climate crisis.
He focused much of his talk on what he deemed the administration’s Orwellian strategy of inverting the truth in pursuit of its political ambitions.
“They say that Ukraine attacked Russia – and they expect us to believe it!” Gore exclaimed. He then fired off a list of the administration’s climate lies in a voice that sometimes growled with anger.
“They say the climate crisis is a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing. They say coal is clean. They say wind turbines cause cancer. They say sea-level rise just creates more beachfront property.”
Gore, who produced the 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, stressed that populist leaders distort truth in order to gain power. He likened it to the Nazis, whose propaganda machine “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
Gore then lit into the fossil fuel industry for being knowing partners in the administration’s assault on truth. Out of desperation at losing market share — over 90 percent of new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind, Gore said — fossil fuel executives regularly claim that a fossil-free future is “just a fantasy” and, absurdly, that “fossil fuels don’t cause climate change – emissions do.”
“The fossil fuel oligarchy argues that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer – for God’s sake! – need to be more ‘realistic.’”
What do you think they want us to be ‘realistic’ about?” he asked the audience.
As Gore spoke near the scenic but rising waters of San Francisco Bay, he enumerated the vast economic and human costs of global warming – $25 trillion of losses in the global housing market by 2050, nine million deaths from air pollution, and up to a billion climate migrants by the end of the century.
“Is it ‘realistic’ to let that continue? Is it ‘realistic’ to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution we’ll be able to just wish it away?”
Gore concluded by praising the audience and event organizers.
“The solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week,” he said. “And if you ever doubt that we have the capacity to muster the political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will itself is a renewal resource.”
After an extended standing ovation, some in the audience spoke about Gore and his legacy.
Heidi Harmon, former mayor of San Luis Obispo, said she became a climate activist after seeing Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, almost two decades ago. “He ruined my life,” she joked, noting that the film’s urgent message forced her to devote herself to climate work.
Frederick Bell, a Climatebase Fellow, called Gore’s speech a “gut check.” The Louisiana native has seen his fair share of climate-caused crises like Katrina.
“It was a rallying cry for everyone in this fight—from policymakers to grassroots organizers to young folks trying to build a future worth inheriting,” Bell said. “We need urgency, honesty, and collective action—across sectors, borders, and ideologies.”
SF Climate Week, organized by Climatebase CEO and co-founder Evan Hynes and SFCW Director Morgan Campbell, is hosting over 600 climate organizations, businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs this week. The week-long event, which has more than quadrupled in size since it began, takes place in multiple venues across the city. Monday night’s opening ceremony was held in the hands-on and fully solar-powered science museum, The Exploratorium.
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