Al Gore on China’s climate rise: ‘I would not have seen this coming’

Twenty-five years ago, Al Gore was in the final stretch of his U.S. presidential campaign, just weeks away from an election that would ultimately slip through his fingers despite winning the popular vote. His platform included ambitious climate action, with America positioned as the natural leader of a global environmental transition.

The irony of what has transpired since is not lost on him. “Looking from the standpoint of 25 years ago, I have to say no, I would not have seen this as the most likely outcome,” Gore admits when asked about China’s emergence as the world’s leading force in the energy transition, a reality that would have seemed almost fantastical to the candidate who once hoped to steer American climate policy from the Oval Office.

But Gore isn’t lamenting China’s climate leadership so much as celebrating that someone is stepping up while expressing frustration that America has ceded the field. As far as he’s concerned, the planet doesn’t care which country leads the charge toward sustainability as long as someone does. What troubles him more is the opportunity cost, the sense that American innovation and influence could be accelerating global progress if the country weren’t busy dismantling its own climate policies.

Gore and Lila Preston of sustainability-focused investment firm Generation Investment Management talked with this editor early Monday morning about their ninth annual climate report, which comprehensively documents both concerning setbacks in U.S. climate policy and China’s remarkable rise as what they call the world’s “first electro state.” 

We spent much of our conversation examining what’s making headlines right now: the tech industry’s growing appetite for rare earth minerals and what responsible mining might look like, how the AI boom’s demand for massive data centers could impact global energy consumption, and whether the space industry’s rocket launches really represent the net positive for climate goals that industry observers believe them to be. Following are excerpts from that chat, edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been tracking these sustainability trends for years now. Given the policy whiplash between U.S. administrations, should other countries stop counting on America to lead on long-term global challenges?

Al Gore: There is a big wheel turning in the right direction, and there are some smaller wheels within the big wheel turning in the opposite direction. The world is moving very powerfully — if you look back 10 years to the time of the Paris Agreement, 55% of all energy investment was still going to fossil fuels, and only 45% to the energy transition. Now those numbers have more than reversed: 65% of financing is going to renewables and only 35% to fossils, and that trend is accelerating.

The United States has played a key role, but it’s been back and forth with changes in party control, which is unfortunate because the world would greatly benefit from sustained, consistent leadership from the U.S. We will survive this setback in the form of all these negative steps Trump has been taking. The rest of the world is moving forward, and even the U.S. will continue to move forward, albeit at a slower pace.

The report suggests China is becoming the world’s first “electro state” while the U.S. abandons the race for clean tech leadership. Could you have imagined this scenario 25 years ago?

Gore: Looking from the standpoint of 25 years ago, I have to say no, I would not have seen this as the most likely outcome. But I was always impressed with the degree to which Chinese leadership was listening carefully to their scientific community.

The story is becoming clearer now. When repeated record droughts cut their hydro capacity, some regional leaders began to feel concern that layoffs might follow, so they’ve been building coal plants and using them at 50% utilization or less. Meanwhile, the breakout construction of solar has been astonishing; they reached their solar goal six years early. This year, they’ve been opening essentially the equivalent of three new one-gigawatt nuclear plants every day in solar capacity for some months. It’s just incredible.

At the beginning of this year, they notified the world that they no longer want to be judged on carbon intensity measurements but on actual reductions. That’s a clear signal, because they never hold themselves to a standard they don’t think they can meet and exceed.

Speaking of coal, the EPA recently proposed ending a requirement for thousands of coal plants and refineries to report greenhouse gas emissions. What does it mean when we stop measuring the problem we’re trying to solve?

Gore: That’s part of their apparent intent to try to make the crisis go away by making all the information describing the crisis go away. But there is some ameliorating news. The partners at Generation Investment Management have been among the principal seed funders of Climate TRACE, which tracks real-time atmospheric carbon emissions.

We now measure 99% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide — the largest 660 million point-source emission sites. We have all of them in the U.S. The old cliche says you can only manage what you measure, and we will continue to have measurements of all significant GHG pollution in the U.S.

Lila Preston: We’re seeing Climate TRACE partnering with the private sector on supply chain visibility. Companies like Altana, one of our portfolio companies, has partnered with them to provide real-time assessment of supply chain risk and opportunity.

Back in January, President Trump announced the $500 billion Stargate Project to build massive AI data centers, starting in Texas. Your report talks about surging electricity demand threatening clean energy progress. Is there a way to pursue ambitious AI development without torpedoing our climate goals?

Preston: This is the best systems-level problem we’ve ever had to work through. The massive demand surge — about 65% coming from the U.S. — represents a shock to the system. Energy use from data centers is 2% today and expected to at least double by 2030. But we believe renewables, storage, and longer-term geothermal could meet this demand.

The flip side is how AI applications across energy, transport, and agriculture can reduce global emissions — some say 6% to 10% annually by 2035. There’s also a significant water footprint — a trillion gallons annually by 2027. We need to think holistically about this massive platform shift.

Gore: Important efforts are beginning to supply clean baseload power to support the decoupling of emissions intensity and compute intensity. Many of the largest builders of new AI capacity are recognizing that the cost advantages of solar plus batteries is now so great that it makes sense to use this as an extra spur to build out solar plus batteries. Many are also consumer-facing companies that are still committed to telling their user base they remain dedicated to sustainability goals, even though this temporary surge will balloon electricity use for data centers.

On that same topic, Elon Musk’s xAI was reportedly operating unpermitted gas turbines for over a year at its Memphis data center in a historically Black neighborhood that already has air quality problems. 

Gore: That’s definitely a big concern. My friends and former constituents in southwest Memphis have been through a lot of environmental injustice already, and to have a 97% Black community, which already has a 5x cancer risk compared to the national average, be assaulted by these extra emissions from large methane turbine generators is really unjust.

They’re coming out of a successful fight to stop a high-pressure oil pipeline from going right through their communities and water source. But as soon as it was blocked, the Tennessee State Legislature passed a law saying no community, no city or county, can interfere with any kind of fossil fuel infrastructure going forward. It’s an example of how the fossil fuel industry, as I’ve often said, is way better at capturing politicians than capturing emissions.

They’ve used their political and economic power to capture control of the policy-making process in too many jurisdictions — local, regional, state, and in the case of the Trump administration, national politics. They also blew up the plastics negotiation because that’s their third largest market, petrochemicals, and used their power to prevent the world from putting any limits on the amount of plastic particles we’re absorbing into our bodies.

But the world is catching up to them, and people in communities like Memphis and elsewhere are saying, “Wait a minute, we’re not going to take all of this unfair burden here.”

That plastics grow unabated is a big story. Precious metals are another big story of this year, in part because tariff threats have underscored the tech industry’s need for these to make their products. What’s your stance on what the hunt for those materials means for our environment?

Gore: These materials have to be mined responsibly and sustainably, and they can be. There have to be aggressive efforts to eliminate abusive and harmful practices we’ve seen in some places. But if you look at the volumes, it’s such a tiny percentage compared to the damage from mining and extracting fossil fuels every single day.

Preston: We’re seeing innovation using advanced modeling and AI to prospect and target where those materials would sit while reducing the load on the landscape and local communities. It’s not perfect, but there’s been a lot of progress in the past three to four years once alarm bells were raised globally that this had to be done more sustainably.

While we’re talking about tech, the space industry is booming. Sending up more rockets is also generating significant carbon emissions. Do you think we should regulate the emissions tied to space launches, or do the climate benefits of space technology justify the carbon footprint?

Gore: I’ve always been of the view that the usefulness of Earth observation from space exceeds the harm from space launches by a fair measure.

Looking at this year’s report, what are your biggest reasons for optimism and concern?

Gore: 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.