Al Gore Lost His S*** at the Economic Forum in Davos
If you haven’t seen Gore’s outburst on the stage during the “Leading the Charge Through Earth’s New Normal” panel discussion at the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Annual Meeting, then I highly recommend you watch it.
Love or hate him, the man has more passion concerning the changing climate than probably most of us combined. I have been a Gore fan since reading about him in a Mother Jones article in 1988. I also think I am one of the few people who understood what he meant when he said he “took initiative in Congress that created the internet.”
Without Gore’s leadership in Congress on the technology that supported the internet, it might not have been created when it was — he has been a visionary his whole life, and the world is a better place thanks to him. The way he handled the 2000 election was remarkable now that we have seen what could have been had he refused to concede.
But let’s get back to his moment in Davos. First, I think the former vice president has an issue with his hearing because he speaks very loudly. The man does not need a microphone, which made his 10-minute recitation of just how bad things are in the battle to mitigate the adverse effects of the changing climate that much more “in our face.”
Gored — With environmental risks taking the top slots in the World Economic Forum’s 2023 risk report, it was inevitable that efforts to tackle climate and nature risks would play a leading role at Davos this week. Some were shocked by the anger expressed at the forum by ex-US VP Al Gore, who distanced himself from US Climate Envoy John Kerry on the growing role of petrostates and oil company executives in climate change negotiations. Already under pressure to reform, the World Bank also felt Gore’s fury for “completely failing to do its job” in enabling climate finance flows, including de-risking for private investors (Shock and Gore at Davos).
As I watched Gore rip through numbers that none of us ever hear about concerning troposphere thickness and annual ice cap melt, all of which helped him better support the nightmarish scenarios he was drawing in front of our eyes, there was one that caught my attention and honestly…
