Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says

(the-guardian-blog, 29 Apr 2016) Leading environmental activist says cheaper renewable energy provides an opportunity to create a sustainable world economy – but we must do more.

Al Gore , former US vice-president, Nobel laureate and chairman of the Climate Reality Project , has led the global discussion about climate change for many years. His multi-award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) has been widely credited with changing the way world leaders and citizens think about the issue. Don Henry is public policy fellow in environmentalism at the University of Melbourne and is a former director of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He is a long-term collaborator with Gore. Their conversation was recorded for the Griffith Review.

Don Henry: The Paris climate agreement was recently concluded – what opportunities and challenges does it present to the world for the future?

Al Gore : This past December, 195 countries came together in Paris for the 21st conference of the parties (COP21) and reached a historic agreement, which exceeded the highest end of the range of expectations we could have had for it. Now the questions we face are how will we solve the climate crisis, what opportunities are we presented with and what challenges remain? COP21 received an unprecedented level of support from all sectors of society, both public and private, creating a window of opportunity aligning at just the right time for a successful agreement. We have created a major new opportunity by committing to a sustainable future. But we have to steer in the right direction and accelerate our pace because we still face challenges. We simply cannot continue to put 110m tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere every day as if it’s an open sewer.

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the-guardian-blog, 29 Apr 2016: Paris agreement is a strong signal that 'we will solve climate crisis', Al Gore says