‘The Evening News Every Night Is Like A Nature Hike Through The Book Of Revelations'

At the Global Action Climate Summit, the former U.S. vice president talks to Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Joel Weber about profiting from sustainabilityand his optimism in the battle to save the planet

What are the most ambitious goals you’d like us to see accomplish within your lifetime?

I’d like to see us solve the climate crisis and build a healthier, more prosperous, fairer, more just society and economy in the process. There are only three questions remaining about the climate process: Must we change? Can we change? Will we change?

We’re still treating the atmosphere as an open sewer. We’re putting 110 million tonnes every day of man-made, heat-trapping pollution into the sky. And it lingers there for a long time. The cumulative amount now traps as much extra heat as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class bombs exploding every day.

It’s a big planet, but that’s a lot of energy, and that’s why it gets hotter every year. That’s why the oceans are getting so hot. That’s why Hurricane Florence intensified so rapidly. That’s why this supertyphoon that’s even larger was headed toward southeast China. That’s why the worst fire in the history of California was one month ago in Mendocino and why the fire season here in the West is 105 days per year longer than it used to be. That’s why the drought in the Southwest is as intense as it is. That’s why there are fish from the ocean swimming in the streets of Miami at high tide—because of the melting ice and sea level rise.

The scientists were spot on in warning us about all of those consequences. Now the evening news every night is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations. We should pay more attention to what the scientific community is telling us will happen in the future if we continue using the sky as an open sewer.

I don’t want to have to explain to my grandchildren why my generation sat around and failed to deal with this. I would much rather tell them how our generation actuallyrose to the moral challenge and found a way to do it.