Gore Sees Doom Over Trump’s Failure To Deal With Climate Change
Tiny pieces of paper may very well spell the end of the earth.
Those tiny pieces were the so-called hanging chads and a handful of them led the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 to disapprove the apparent winner, Al Gore, and hand the election to George Bush.
It was a monumental moment as Gore, the famed battler of climate change, would lose the opportunity to enact his plans, leaving environmental policy to Bush who had close ties with fossil fuel industries and business lobbyists.
Upon his election, Bush made two major decisions that would have dire impacts on climate change in coming years. He veered away from a critical pledge he had made during the presidential campaign to enact laws to regulate a key cause of climate change, the emissions of carbon dioxide coming from power plants.
And in March 2001, the Bush administration announced that it would not implement the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty signed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. The treat required nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but Bush said it would create economic setbacks in the U.S.
The former vice president, Gore, has been a longtime environmentalist and was the co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has been involved with the environmental activist movement for decades and has continued since he left the vice-presidency in 2001.
Chads
Hanging chads have led us to the point we are now. On Nov. 7, 2000, it became clear that Gore had won the popular vote by roughly a half-million ballots. But in the battle for the crucial Electoral College vote it became clear that the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes would win the race for the White House.
The margin in the Sunshine State came down to just 537 votes out of six million cast. All the TV networks declared Gore the winner but Florida’s secretary of state called the election for Bush. Gore called Bush to congratulate him on his victory, but the narrow margin of victory led him to rescind the concession. The Democrats insisted that the margin in Florida was so tiny that a recount was in order. Republicans insisted that a recount was unnecessary.
Bush’s margin was so small that typical irregularities that mar the margins of any major election grew into a major national controversy. One point of contention was the punch-card ballots. In some cases, the portion of the perforated paper or “hanging chads” on the ballots had not been fully detached making it uncertain who had voted for whom, thereby creating doubt over the winner.
The Florida Supreme Court agreed with the Democratic call for a recount but the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7–2 to end the Florida court’s ordered recount, making Bush the victor.
Bush Policies
There is a direct line from Bush’s environmental policies to trump’s ongoing, brutal efforts to undermine and undo any progress made on climate change.
Trump has called climate change a hoax and most recently, with the stroke of a sharpie, he summarily dismissed all the authors of the National Climate Assessment. The assessment is a major climate report which includes contributions from hundreds of authors, documenting climate change in the United States. The report has been published every four to five years but trump’s ruling means the next report, due in 2028, could be delayed, or written in a way that downplays climate change, or not done at all.
Trump’s decision clears the way for the administration to further ignore or plant doubts in the overwhelming scientific evidence that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of global warming. Trump’s decision will undoubtedly result in further fossil fuel development and intensify the well-documented effects of climate change, including floods, hurricanes, droughts, sea level rises and wildfires.
The last National Climate Assessment came out in 2023. It found that climate change was already transforming every region of the country, with more frequent and intense extreme weather events and a slew of other costly and harmful effects.
Trump’s latest move is part of an alarming blitzkrieg to roll back regulations that were put in place by past administrations to slow or stop climate change. During his presidential campaign, trump promised to promote the oil and gas industry and he was rewarded with more than $75 million in campaign contributions.
Since his election, trump has fast-tracked approvals for natural gas pipelines and mining projects. He has sped up authorization for fossil fuel projects on public lands and he signed an executive order designed to revive the coal industry.
Trump has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cancel many of its regulatory functions, including repealing regulations on pollutants from smokestacks and tailpipes, abandoning efforts to protect wetlands and forfeiting the legal basis that allows the EPA has to regulate planet-warming emissions.
Shortly after his inauguration, trump directed the United States to withdraw from the landmark Paris Agreement, a 2015 pact among almost all nations to fight climate change. Trump had pulled the nation out of the pact during his first administration but President Joe Biden had renewed the nation’s pledge and membership in the Paris Agreement.
While the U.S. is falling behind in the efforts to tackle climate change, other nations are pushing ahead.
Various techniques are being tested to stop carbon pollution from being released during industrial processes, or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, to then lock it up permanently. One project is being led by the UK’s University of Exeter to try and capture carbon from seawater.
The British government announced up to $26.7 billion in funding to support carbon capture, including one project called SeaCURE, which will determine if capture of carbon from the English Channel actually works.
Continuing Warrior
Gore is still making his voice heard about the dangers of climate change and the possible solutions. Most recently, he spoke at a Climate Week conference in San Francisco.
Gore said that the nation has to deal with a democracy crisis, caused by trump, before it can solve the climate crisis. He referred to the lies of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in discussing the scale and scope of trump’s assault on democracy.
Gore said that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers, known as the Frankfort School of Philosophers, had escaped the Nazi regime and returned to Germany to examine and find ways to avoid another totalitarian government. The leader of the group was Jurgen Haberman, whose mentor, Theodor Adorno, wrote that “the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was ‘the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.’”
Gore said that Adorno described how the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
“The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality.” Gore said. “They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.”
Other lies by the trump regime include claims that the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing; that coal is clean, wind turbines cause cancer and sea level rise just creates more beachfront property.
Gore said that trump and his oil and gas oligarch allies have long argued for a national strategy based on “climate realism.” Those allies claim that “those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more ‘realistic’ and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.”
Gore said the CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco has said “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions.”
“The American Petroleum Institute says that we need a more ‘realistic energy approach’ one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas,” Gore said. “This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there is no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces.”
Gore said the “twisted version” of “realistic” collides with the reality that humanity is now confronting.
“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 and continue with business as usual?” said Gore. “Well, Mother Nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night on the TV news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.”
African Development
Gore said the worldwide system of financing energy projects is woefully inadequate. The entire continue of Africa, for example, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida. Fossil fuel companies, however, have been concentrating on expanding into Africa rather than on developing sustainable energy source like solar and wind.
“But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction and preparing for construction to begin than all of North America,” Gore said.
In 2021, ExxonMobil was the most profitable oil company in the world, with $286 billion in revenues. Second was Shell PLC with $273 billion in revenues; Total Energies, $185 billion; BP, $164 billion; Chevron, $163 billion; Marathon, $141 billion; Phillips 66, $115 billion; Valero, $108 billion; Eni, $77 billion; and ConocoPhillips, $48.3 billion.
The African continent, however, is fast developing as a player in the global oil market. Business Insider reported that Africa accounts for 35 percent of all new oil finds in 2024 with 60 percent of new oil finds in Africa occurring in frontier and immature basins. Multinational oil companies like Chevron, TotalEnergies and Shell play a crucial role in Africa’s oil industry.
“The rise in oil finds across Africa is expected to generate significant economic advantages. As global investment comes into Africa, countries with potential oil deposits should expect improved energy security, infrastructure development, and job creation,” according to a statement from the African Energy Chamber.
A growing player in African oil development is Africa Oil Corp., a Canadian oil and gas exploration and production company with interests in Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa, and Equatorial Guinea. The company operates in deep-water offshore Nigeria and has recently provided updates on its drilling operations, including the Marula-1X well in Namibia, which was safely drilled to a total depth.
Recently, Africa Oil completed a major deal to streamline its upstream holdings in three of Nigeria’s biggest oilfields, triggering a 2.7 percent rise in its stock price in early morning trading.
In early 2020, Africa Oil and Brazil’s BTG Pactual Oil & Gas established a company called Prime Oil & Gas that acquired Petrobras’ assets in Nigeria, including stakes in the deepwater Akpo and Egina fields, operated by TotalEnergies, and Chevron’s Agbami field. The arrangement emerged after a consortium of Vitol, Africa Oil and Delonex Energy, struck a $1.4 billion deal to acquire half of Petrobras’ deep-water assets in Nigeria.
TotalEnergies SE, a French multinational integrated energy and petroleum company, is one of the seven supermajor oil companies. In the 2023 Forbes Global 2000, TotalEnergies was ranked as the 21st largest company in the world.
Petrobras is a Brazilian majority state-owned multinational petroleum corporation that was ranked 71st in the 2023 Fortune Global 500 list. Petrobras has returned to the African oil and gas market, buying three exploration blocks in the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, three years after selling off its Nigerian assets for $1.5 billion.
São Tomé is the capital and largest city of the Central African island country of São Tomé and Príncipe. Príncipe is the smaller, northern major island of the country off the west coast of Africa.
Another major energy player in Africa is the Swiss-based Vitol. With revenues of $400 billion in 2023, Vitol is the largest independent energy trader in the world. The company ships more than 350 million tons of crude oil per year and controls 250 supertankers and other vessels to move it around the world. On average it handles more than 7.3 million barrels a day of oil and products, roughly equivalent to the daily consumption of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest oil consumer after the United States, China, and India.
The sub-Saharan oil and gas company Delonex Energy also has invested $600 million to fund oil and gas exploration in central and east Africa. The project is funded by Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm focused on growth investing. Warburg Pincus has more than $40 billion in assets under management. Delonex Energy is headquartered in London, with subsidiaries in Ethiopia, India, Moçambique and Kenya.
Tullow Oil PLC is another multinational oil and gas exploration company that is involved in exploration and development in Uganda.