Al Gore gets hot and bothered about fossil fuels. And junk offsets
Al Gore's latest TED talk is good, but what he doesn't talk about is deeply worrying
In July 2023, at his TED talk at the TED Countdown Summit in Detroit Michigan, Al Gore focusses on the fossil fuel industry and its opposition to action to address the climate crisis.
On Heated, Emily Atkin writes that Gore has turned a corner:
With this new talk, it’s become clear that the man who made “An Inconvenient Truth” famous is no longer primarily focused on convincing people that the climate crisis is real or dangerous. He’s turned a corner, and is now focused on convincing people that if they truly care about solving the climate crisis, they must turn their ire toward the fossil fuel industry — and boot them from the negotiating table before it’s too late.
I’m not convinced that Gore has really turned a corner. It’s more like a slight curve on the road he’s travelling on.
Gore’s proposals for addressing the climate crisis do nothing to address over-consumption, capitalism, extractivism, or neo-colonialism.
Here’s Gore’s list of what we need to address the climate crisis:
None of these are as straightforward as Gore makes out. Renewables need huge amounts of lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. Mining these will inevitably result in serious environmental and social impacts. It’s not even clear that there are enough minerals available to convert the current energy and economic system to renewables.
But Gore’s criticism of the fossil fuel industry is nevertheless welcome.
“The solutions are going to come from a discussion and collaboration about phasing out fossil fuels,” Gore says.
The Inflation Reduction Act
Gore spends the first few minutes of his talk convincing us that the climate crisis is real. Then he moves on to the Inflation Reduction Act:
“Obviously, the crisis has to be addressed and the good news is as others have often said, we are seeing tremendous progress and it starts with Inflation Reduction Act here in the United States.”
Gore describes this as “the best, biggest, climate legislation in all of history”.
But Gore doesn’t mention any of the criticism of the Act, or the concessions by the Biden Administration to the fossil fuel industry. The Climate Justice Alliance concluded that, “the harms of the bill as it is currently written outweigh its benefits”.
In a Climate Justice Alliance statement, Vivian Yi Huang of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network says,
“At a time when massive heat waves and wildfires are wreaking havoc around the world, we cannot afford to dump billions into expanding dirty fossil fuel infrastructure. The Inflation Reduction Act includes some worthwhile investments in renewable energy and health care, but it also brings even more harm to people living alongside big polluters and further destabilizes our climate. We need real climate solutions that transition us away from fossil fuels and invest in building healthy, life-sustaining economies in the communities most harmed by the fossil fuel industry.”
Gore refers to the new governments in Australia and Brazil that are more serious about addressing the climate crisis than previous administrations. The EU, Gore says, has “resisted the efforts of Russia to blackmail it into supporting its sadistic and cruel invasion of Ukraine”.
Obviously, Gore doesn’t mention the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, the methane released, or the fact that much of the Russian gas was replaced by imports from the United States. Equally obviously, he doesn’t mention the massive impacts of the US war machine on the climate.
“There are other signs of success as well,” Gore continues. China, for example, which he notes has met its renewables target five years early.
“In spite of this progress, the emissions are still going up,” Gore says. “And the crisis is still getting worse, faster than we are deploying the solutions.”
Gore’s presentation focusses on two obstacles that are standing in the way of progress:
Opposition from the fossil fuel industry; and
The global financial system and fossil fuel subsidies.
Don’t worry, the former vice-president of the USA isn’t suggesting the overthrow of capitalism.
He notes that in 2022, direct fossil fuel subsidies reached US$1.1 trillion globally. “That’s five times larger than the amount in 2020,” Gore notes.
Since the Paris Agreement the 60 largest banks in the world have handed out US$5.5 trillion in fossil fuel financing.
But all Gore says about the global financial system is that it can cost seven times as much to borrow money in Nigeria as in “advanced economies”. “Interest rates, political risk, corruption risk, currency risk, offtake risk, it’s rule of law risk,” Gore explains.
In the few moments that he talks about the global financial system, Gore doesn’t mention overconsumption, extractivism, or critiques of never ending capitalist growth such as the degrowth movement.
Instead, Gore talks about the World Bank. Along with other multilateral development banks, he says, the World Bank supposed to take the layers of risk off investment in countries such as Nigeria.
“That’s why we need reform in the World Bank,” Gore says. “Thank goodness so many fought to get a new head of the World Bank and I’m very excited about his progress.”
Ajay Banga is the World Bank’s fourteenth president. A new leader is unlikely to fundamentally change things at the Bank.
In 1994, I took part in the 50 years is enough protests at the Bank’s annual meeting in Madrid. After a week of protests, tens of thousands of people marched through Madrid in protest against the World Bank.
Lewis Preston was president of the Bank back then. One of the protesters’ songs was a variation on the Kingsmen’s classic “Louie Louie”: “Lewis Lewis, oh no, you’ve gotta go, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.”
But the World Bank Group didn’t improve when Preston resigned from the World Bank in March 1995. If anything, things have got worse since then.
In his 2014 book “Foreclosing the Future”, Bruce Rich dedicates two chapters to the Bank’s woefully inadequate and misguided responses to the climate crisis.
As German NGO Urgewald points out, “the World Bank is still using its public funding to drive billions and billions into fossil fuel investments, including coal”.
The Bank’s carbon trading mechanism, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility has utterly failed to reduce deforestation in any of the countries it operates in. And the Bank’s recent venture into crypto and carbon is a marriage made in hell.
The fossil fuel industry
Gore tells us that a lot of people think that the fossil fuel industry is “on side, and trying to help”. Unfortunately he doesn’t say who these people are. Carbon consulting firms like South Pole and BINGOs like The Nature Conservancy sprint to mind though.
Gore points out the blindingly obvious. The oil industry is not on side:
“But let me tell you, and the activists will all tell you this, every piece of legislation, whether it’s at the municipal level, the regional or provincial level, the national level, or the international level, they’re in there, with their lobbyists, with their fixers, and with their revolving door colleagues, doing everything they can to slow down progress.”
Gore notes that the fossil fuel industry has captured the policy making process in too many countries around the world.
“For decades now the companies have had the evidence, they know the truth, and they consciously decided to lie to publics all around the world in order to calm down the political momentum for doing something about it. So they could make more money. It’s simple as that.”
This is all true and it’s great to hear Gore saying it.
Of course, when Gore spoke about the Inflation Reduction Act he could have mentioned the fact that the Biden Administration is also not immune to being captured by the fossil fuel industry.
As Jonathan Foley at Project Drawdown recently wrote,
“The Biden Administration is backing industrial carbon capture schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Big Oil – bolstering their bottom lines and extending a PR lifeline that ensures they can continue polluting – all under the guise of climate action.”
The fossil fuel industry’s capture of the UN climate meetings
Gore moves on to the fact that fossil fuel industry has taken control of the UN’s annual climate meetings, including COP28, which will take place in the petrostate of the United Arab Emirates.
Gore points out that the president of COP28, Sultan al Jaber, is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). ADNOC’s emissions are larger than those of ExxonMobil or BP, and the company has no credible plan to reduce them.
ADNOC has a new expansion plan that will result in emissions increasing by 50% by 2030. The expansion will start just two weeks after the end of COP28.
“The fossil fuel industry has captured this process and is slowing it down and we need to do something about it,” Gore says.
By this time, Gore is shouting. “Getting all hot and bothered here,” he says.
At COP27, the petrostates vetoed any mention of a “fossil fuel phase-down” in the COP resolution. Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs said that, “We don’t see this as a discussion about fossil fuels.”
Gore’s response to this is spot on:
“Let me tell you. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. The solutions are going to come from a discussion and collaboration about phasing out fossil fuels. And there’s only so much longer they can hold this up and tie us down and keep us from doing the right thing.”
He gives a checklist to determine whether fossil fuel companies are sincere.
Has the company:
Adopted real net-zero commitments that cover absolute emissions from scopes 1-3, include interim targets for 2025 and 2030 and don’t rely on the use of junk offsets?
Planned a clear phase-down plan for oil and gas production, aligned with the 1.5°C target, including interim 2030 goals and ending new or expanded production?
Committed to comprehensive and full disclosure of all GHG emissions?
Used windfall profits to invest substantially in clear energy technologies and adaptation / mitigation funding for developing economies?
Committed to complete transparency in all corporate lobbying and ending all anti-climate lobbying?
Ended greenwashing, including the labelling of “carbon neutral” or “net zero” fossil fuels?
Supported reform of the COP negotiating process to remove the requirement for total unanimity?
Gore explains the final point as follows:
Reforming the COP process so that the petrostates don’t have an absolute veto on anything the world wants to discuss or act on. We’ve got to change that. In order to move faster we have got to empower the global community in a way that frees them from the hammer lock that the fossil fuel companies have on them today.
Gore argues that any company that does not pass this checklist should be prohibited from taking part in the COP process.
Gore puts the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to the test. Needless to say it fails.
The myth of Carbon Capture and Storage
The oil industry, Gore says, is now telling us that the problem isn’t fossil fuels, it’s the emissions from fossil fuels. So we just have to capture the emissions from the fossil fuels.
“Now I’m all for research and development into trying to capture or sucking it out of the air if they want to do that,” Gore says. “But let’s don’t pretend it’s for real. Maybe some day it will be.”
Gore points out that the technology of carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been around for about 50 years. But it hasn’t become cheaper and better. He refers to a University of Oxford study that looked at how the development of technologies for the energy transition. Some technologies develop quickly, some slowly. A few are in a category called non-improving technology.
The study concludes that CCS is an example of non-improving technology. “Despite significant effort, over its 50-year commercial history for enhanced oil recovery, costs have not declined at all.”
The myth of Direct Air Capture
Gore continues with a critique of Direct Air Capture (DAC):
“These are giant vacuum cleaners that use an awful lot of energy. It’s technically feasibly, but it’s extremely expensive and it also uses so much energy. But it is tremendously useful. You know what it’s used for? The CEO of one of the largest oil companies in the US told us what it’s useful for. It’s useful for giving them an excuse for not ever stopping oil.”
The CEO is Vicki Hollub of Occidental Petroleum. In March 2023 Hollub said at an oil and gas industry conference in Houston that,
“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
And just in case this wasn’t clear enough, in August 2023, Occidental announced that it was buying a Canadian startup DAC company called Carbon Engineering Ltd for US$1.1 billion.
Gore explains that the biggest obstacle to DAC is physics.
“CO₂ makes up 0.035% of the air. So we’re going to vacuum the other 99.96% to get that little bit out. Come on! Really? Come on.
“And it doesn’t even pretend to catch the methane, or the soot, or the mercury, or the particulate pollution that kills 9 million people a year round the world. And that’s why the climate justice advocates are so down on this kind of nonsense.”
Gore quotes Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Co-Executive Director at the Climate Justice Alliance, who opposes the way the fossil fuel industry uses DAC as a way of avoiding meaningful change:
But Gore doesn’t tell us the context of Bineshi’s comment. It was made in response to a climate rule announced by Joe Biden in May 2023.
Here’s Bineshi’s comment in full:
“Today’s proposed rule from the Biden Administration to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants is critical recognition that we must cut climate pollution if our communities are to survive.
“But if we are to combat climate change we must do so with real, viable solutions – not unproven technologies that only promise to continue the legacy of dumping pollutants onto frontline communities.
“Let’s be clear: Carbon capture and sequestration technologies are harmful and unproven. They do not operate at scale, and to expand carbon capture to a fraction of what is envisioned by this order would require constructing thousands of miles of polluting pipelines into communities already most impacted by the burning of fossil fuels. A study in the European Union showed that adding Carbon Capture to power plants increased Nitrogen Oxides by 44%, particulate matter by 33%, and ammonia by a whopping 30 fold increase. CCS projects will exacerbate environmental disparities and lead to more environmental racism. This is a distraction – one that will let fossil fuel extraction continue unchecked.
“While we recognize the Biden Administration’s ambitious goal of combating carbon pollution and shutting down polluting power plants – we demand real, community-based climate and energy solutions, not more false promises for the sake of the fossil fuel industry. We need bold action. It’s time Biden declare a national climate emergency!”
Gore is silent on how heavily the Biden administration subsidises carbon capture. Jonathan Foley at Project Drawdown writes that,
For the foreseeable future, cutting emissions is the most feasible means of addressing climate change. And whatever carbon removal we might eventually develop should only be used to address the final, hard-to-abate emissions left after fossil fuels are phased out. Most of all, carbon removal should never be used as a substitute for cutting emissions, or to help delay phasing out fossil fuels.
So why is the federal government doing exactly the opposite – putting big money behind dubious carbon capture projects, in ways that specifically benefit Big Oil and help delay climate action?
Gore asks where the all the energy will come from to power DAC machines. If it comes from fossil fuels, that’s a problem, obviously. And if it comes from solar and wind, “Why not use the solar and wind to replace the fossil fuel burning plants that are putting all that stuff up there in the first place?” Gore asks. “Doesn’t that make sense? Am I missing something?”
Gore on carbon offsets
When Al Gore talks about carbon offsets, what he doesn’t say is way more important than what he does say. Gore says nothing in his TED Talk about the role he played as lead negotiator for the United States at COP3 - the 1997 UN climate negotiations in Kyoto.
Before COP3, the European Union wanted emissions cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team managed to water this down to 5.2% by 2012.
Meaningful action on the climate crisis in the 1990s would have put us in a much better position today.
But after watering down the targets, Gore’s team did something even worse. The US negotiating team introduced carbon trading into the UN climate negotiations. The result was an enormous market in carbon credits and fake emissions reductions.
26 years later, Gore seems to have forgotten all about Kyoto and the disaster of the carbon trading mechanisms that he helped create.
At his recent TED Talk he says,
“Now some other companies of course you say ‘We're gonna offset our emissions.’ And again offsets can play a role. A small role, 5 to 10% according to the Science Based Targets Initiative, the most authoritative source on all of this.”
I would dispute whether the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) is really “the most authoritative source” on offsets. Why is the 2020 statement exposing 10 myths about net zero and carbon offsets, for example, that 41 scientists signed on to not at least equally authoritative?
The Science Based Targets Initiative was established by four organisation that are all proponents of carbon trading: CDP, which was previously called the Carbon Disclosure Project; the United Nations Global Compact; World Resources Institute; and World Wide Fund for Nature.
In October 2021, Tom Dowdall of SBTi wrote that,
Science-based net-zero targets will require long-term deep decarbonization targets of 90-95% across all scopes before 2050. When a company reaches its net-zero target, only a very limited amount of residual emissions can be neutralised with high quality carbon removals, this will be no more than 5-10%.
But Dowdall also acknowledges that,
An overreliance on carbon offsets in net-zero targets creates multiple problems around land use, equity, fairness and climate justice. The SBTi Net-Zero Standard cannot adequately address all these issues.
And in April 2023, SBTi put out an SBTi Corporate Manual that states explicitly that corporations should exclude offsets from their climate targets:
Exclude the use of offsets
Offsets (or carbon credits) are different than GHG reductions within a company’s value chain as they are used to compensate for GHG emissions elsewhere. They are calculated relative to a baseline that represents a hypothetical scenario for what emissions would have been in the absence of the mitigation project generating the offsets.
Offsets shall not be counted as reductions toward meeting a near-term SBT. Instead, companies must account for reductions resulting from direct action within their operations or value chains. Offsets may be useful, however, as an option for companies wishing to finance additional emission reductions beyond the SBT.
Chevron’s junk offsets
Gore highlights a recent report by Corporate Accountability that analysed Chevron’s corporate offsets programme.
Gore says,
“Chevron just had its offsets analysed. It turned out 93% of them were worthless and junk, and that’s too often the case. It’s not a get out of jail card.
“And their offsets were only aimed at 10% of their emissions in the first place. 80% of the fossil fuel companies just completely ignore the scope 3 emissions which is the main part of their pollution problem.”
Gore points out that the amount that the fossil fuel industry spends on renewable and carbon capture is only 1% of the amount the industry spends in total, when dividends and stock buybacks are included.
It’s great that Gore is focussing on the fossil fuels industry as a key reason for our collective failure to address the climate crisis. But the fact that he doesn’t mention the influence the fossil fuels industry has over the Biden Administration is worrying.
Equally worrying is his failure to own up to his role in watering down targets at the UN negotiations, and in promoting carbon trading in the Kyoto Protocol.
And his failure to mention the systematic structural changes needed to address the crises we are facing globally is most worrying of all.
Intense article with so many links to follow, thank you. I vividly remember wishing the ticket was reversed at The Democratic Convention when Gore spoke. His words about the environment spoke to my heart. He published An Inconvenient Truth, I own a copy, but he caved in Florida to W which baffled and infuriated me. I would have to watch his Ted Talk to give a full opinion here, but if he didn't address overconsumption, population, the shortcomings of Biden's decisions and Degrowth, he fell woefully short. Here's to your growth, Chris. Keep working. Doing the same, I know how much time and energy goes into swimming upstream. My latest, at least a small victory for what's right. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/a-victory-for-a-clean-and-healthful
Ah, my favourite sport - tearing up Granfalloons! (such as Al Gore)
There’s another in Vermont who should suffer a similar fate. These people have totally closed minds and exist in their own clique or social bubble and cannot countenance another idea regardless of how good. See, if you write a Book, printed on paper, you are a demi-god while if you only write online, you are less than scum.
Yes, as the representative of the US govt, Gore had no choice (?) but to gut the Kyoto agreement so that it would be essentially worthless (or less). Then apparently he got a guilt complex from that and set about to produce the “Inconvenient Truth.” I actually spent money to see that turkey in a theatre, only to be disappointed by the pathetic string of “wedges” at the finale. Similar to the film’s ending is Gore’s chart presented here on dark background: “We need more…” Like Chris states above this, no mention of “over-consumption, capitalism, extractivism or neo-colonialism.” Because, instead of all the “Mores” of Al Gore, we need LESS of everything! People in the rich North consume on average 30x the energy of world average per capita. As well, people say, we need to cut emissions by 50% by (whatever) year. So what’s the problem - if we cut emissions by 50% we are still 15x world average energy consumption, so still have a long way to go. We need LESS of everything - less energy used, less cars, no flying, less consumption of “toys,” and zero expenditure on relieving human boredom!
And then after making the movie, Gore CO2-ed around the world presenting it!
As we know, World Bank and IMF are back-handed policy instruments of the US. And remember, regarding lobbyists, what John Dewey said in 1905: “Politics is the shadow cast upon society by big business.”
As for the COP meeting, is matters not a hoot whether fossil fuel industries can appear or vote, the whole enterprise is a scam. Here’s what Dr. James Hansen said in his latest post http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2023/UhOh.14August2023.pdf
Dr. James Hansen: "Political leaders at the United Nations COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings give the impression that progress is being made and it is still feasible to limit global warming to as little as 1.5°C. That is pure, unadulterated, hogwash, as exposed by minimal understanding of Fig. 6 here and Fig. 27 in reference 6."
Thank you for this excellent (large) bit of journalism! Well done!