Former Vice President Al Gore says he is optimistic world leaders will reach a climate change deal at a United Nations conference next month.
“We’re going to win this,” Gore told The Associated Press in an interview. “We need to win it faster because a lot of damage is being done day by day. We continue to put 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, as if it’s an open sewer.”
{mosads}World leaders will meet in Paris starting on Nov. 30 to work toward a deal cutting carbon emissions around the globe. President Obama will travel to France for the first two days of the conference.
Each country is going to the Paris with a set reduction target — the United States’s is a 26 percent to 28 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2025 — and climate advocates have been hearted by the participation of high-polluting countries like the U.S., China and India.
In the interview, Gore said officials are more likely to work together now than in the past because the impacts of global warming are beginning to show up around the world.
He said corporate action in the United States has signaled a willingness by the private sector to take climate change seriously.
“Increasingly people are connecting those dots,” he said. “And even if they don’t use the phrase climate crisis or global warming, more and more people are feeling that this is going to have to be addressed.”
Gore, the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, has spent much of his post-politics life advocating for action on climate change.
His climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” came out in 2006 and he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his activism the following year. He has spoken highly of Obama’s climate change agenda.
Gore will head to Paris this weekend to hold a climate change rally, the AP reports.