Al Gore wonders if ‘bullying’ Trump prompted Bill Gates to backtrack on climate

Exclusive interview with ex-US vice-president at Cop30 also reveals his hope around much-maligned climate summit

Fear of being bullied by Donald Trump may have prompted Bill Gates to row back on the climate crisis, Al Gore has speculated, as he slammed the billionaire’s new position as “silly”, and the US president for his anti-climate stance.

Trump, “the most corrupt president in American history”, was “badly damaging the US economy” by pulling away from renewable energy and promoting fossil fuels, the former US vice-president warned.

“[Trump’s] already doing a lot of damage [on the climate],” Gore said, in an interview with the Guardian at the Cop30 United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil. “Maybe the biggest harm he’s doing is to the United States itself, and one figure now illustrates it. China is now exporting green technology to the rest of the world that has a cumulative export value that is significantly higher than all of the fossil fuel exports from the United States to the rest of the world. And that trend is obviously accelerating quite dramatically.”

Gates, a philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, made waves around the world when he publicly argued for pushing the climate crisis down the international agenda, in favour of more focus on health issues.

“The idea of slowing down on climate again, every climate scientist that I know and respect just threw up their hands and said: ‘What in the world is he thinking?’” said Gore.

“When Trump was elected the second time, Bill fired most of his climate staffers and went to the White House and lavished praise on Trump, and then put out this series of statements last week that puzzled anybody who was really concerned about the climate crisis.”

Gore noted that the chiefs of many large businesses in the US fear reprisals from the US president if they disagree with him, saying: “It may be that he is really worried that Trump will bully him the way he has bullied other ultra-wealthy business people. It looks like it may be possible that he’s scared of Trump.”

The US president responded to Gates’s reversal with praiseful social media posts.

Gore said: “I don’t know why [Gates] would do this … the only rave review of what he put out last week was from Donald Trump. Yeah, Trump loves it. That may be what Gates was shooting for.”

Gates and Gore were formerly seen as philanthropic allies in the fight against major problems facing humanity, including the climate crisis, appearing at the same events to warn of the consequences for humanity and the need to act.

Setting up the climate crisis and the global health crisis as opposing choices for intervention, as Gates appeared to do, was wrong, added Gore, saying: “The idea that there is a binary choice between health and climate is an idea that’s been roundly rejected by virtually every scientist in this field, and the World Health Organisation has said long since that climate is the No 1 health threat to humanity.”

He added: “I almost felt badly for Bill when the same day he put his statement out, the Lancet, the very authoritative, deeply respected Lancet … put out its latest report showing the enormous health consequences of not accelerating climate action. The idea that you have to choose one over the other is quite silly.”

Instead of taking money away from climate action, Gates should have advocated that governments re-purpose the hundreds of billions of dollars they spend giving subsidies to fossil fuels, and focus them on health instead, Gore argued. “It’s literally insane that governments around the world are forcing their taxpayers to subsidise the destruction of part of humanity’s future,” he said. “Accelerating solutions to the climate crisis is one of the single most effective ways to improve healthcare in the world.”

Gore also robustly defended the UN process of annual “conference of the party” meetings on climate. “The Cop process accomplishes far more than it is given credit for accomplishing, partly because it serves as a nucleus for all of the industry and NGO and trade groups and civil society groups that assemble at Cop every year, and many of them come up with their own agreements that move things forward,” he said.

Industries and governments were pushing ahead with new technology and implementing renewable energy and other low-carbon initiatives, he said: “The achievements of each successive Cop are often cumulative, and the Cop process itself is one of the principal reasons that the sustainability revolution has shifted into high gear, and more and more nations are now realising that this is the future.”

Gore added: “There is a lot of very positive progress under way. It’s just stunning to watch the progress in these solutions [to cutting greenhouse gas emissions and shifting to a low-carbon economy]. There’s a completely false view out there that somehow we are losing ground.”

Gore also celebrated what he sees as a “generational change” in the US, by which many people are turning towards climate action even while the federal government is dismantling it. He warned that Trump might face a “less obsequious” Congress, in the light of the series of election defeats for Republican candidates in US elections last week.

“The American people spoke pretty loudly and clearly last week, in unexpectedly large landslide defeats for Trump in every election that was on the ballot, and Republican senators have now begun to break with him on some of his priorities,” said Gore.

Gore had some praise for Zohran Mamdani, the progressive politician who was elected mayor of New York, saying: “Some of his proposals were ones that I did not agree with, but I thought that he ran a stunningly effective campaign. His basic skills as a politician were impressively on display.”

Cover photo:  Al Gore at the UN Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil, on Wednesday. Photograph: Anderson Coelho/Reuters