Al Gore Nails It Again — This Is Where We Are

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Al Gore recently participated in a podcast discussion on the StrictlyVC Download podcast. As usual, he nailed it on multiple topics. However, it was his comments at the end that triggered this article.

He was asked, “Looking at this year’s report, what are your biggest reasons for optimism and concern?” He responded:

“What continues to fuel my optimism is the steady and even accelerating advance of all the solutions we need. They continue getting cheaper, and the ability of the fossil fuel industry to resist this transition is diminishing regularly. This transition is unstoppable.

“But the remaining question is whether we’ll make this transition in time to avoid negative tipping points. Just in the last few days, we got a stunning report that the cold upwelling along the western coast of South America — the Humboldt Current so crucial to the marine food chain — did not happen this year for the first time ever.

“I’m fond of Dornbusch’s Law: things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. I think we’ve crossed that point now, but we need to accelerate the change. We have the technologies, the deployment models, the economics are in our favor, public opinion is in our favor — we just have to accelerate the decline in the ability of polluting industries to resist it.”

These are the big issues in a nutshell.

1) Cleantech solution continue to get cheaper, better, and more and more competitive. They will win. There is no doubt about it. Fossil fuels are on the way out. There is still much delusion about this, with countless people around the world thinking that fossil fuels are going to be used for electricity and transportation forever. The revolution is now well underway. It still has some years to go, but it is not being reversed or stopping.

2) However, we are in a serious race against time with the heating of the planet, and there’s still a huge concern that we are losing that race. Frankly, damage is already done, and much more damage is coming. The question is how much more. And, as Gore points out, are we going to let it get to severe tipping points where it’s extremely difficult — or impossible — to get things under control.

3) Dornbusch’s Law! Yes! I feel like we are in that place a bit with cleantech. I basically wrote about this recently with declining battery costs and how automakers are quietly taking advantage of them but we are getting closer and closer to some big new models and transition periods in the auto industry. Then there’s also Christopher’s piece on sodium-ion batteries. Then there’s the electricity generation side of things. Renewables have been dominating new power additions, but it feels like it’s taking forever to get fossil fuels off the grid. But it won’t take forever. And one day, it will feel like everything has changed so quickly. Stay tuned on CleanTechnica….

Al Gore has been one of the best cleantech communicators in the world for decades. It’s too bad he doesn’t do more communicating out there in public. Though, there are also good reasons for it. And that’s what we’re here for.

Addendum: I have a funny story from meeting Al Gore once when he was speaking at a conference I was covering in the UAE. I’ll leave that for a coming YouTube discussion.

Featured photo by World Economic Forum (CC BY-NC 2.0 license)