Al Gore Sees a Possible Climate Tipping Point in 2026, but Warns Dangers Are Accelerating
Al Gore says 2026 could mark a positive climate tipping point as renewables overtake fossil fuels, but warns the crisis is still accelerating.
Former US vice president Al Gore believes the world may be approaching a turning point in the fight against climate change, even as he cautions that the dangers are mounting faster than efforts to contain them.
Speaking during New York Climate Week, Gore said there is a real possibility that 2026 will be remembered as the start of a positive shift. He pointed to solar power having overtaken coal in both the United States and China, and noted that for the first time the energy produced by renewables is equal to or slightly more than the growth in overall energy demand.
"We're in grave danger, but I think there is at least a possibility that 2026 will be looked back upon in the history books as the beginnings of a positive tipping point," he said.
Gore, a longtime climate advocate, said the world may be nearing peak use of coal, oil and gas — the fossil fuels driving global warming — as cleaner renewable power gains ground. He noted that a decade ago, 55% of global investment went to fossil fuels and 45% to renewables, while today the split has reversed, with 65% going to renewables. Society shifts when a new technology becomes cheaper than the old one, he said, comparing the change to mobile phones replacing landlines.
Yet he stressed that progress is not keeping pace with the scale of the threat. "In spite of all these optimistic developments the crisis is still getting worse much faster than we are deploying all these available solutions," Gore said.
He described the present moment as a profound transition, arguing that the fossil fuel industry is forcing the world to treat energy security and climate security as a single issue rather than competing priorities. Both, he said, share the same solution: accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels.
Gore said nature makes him nervous, citing accelerating warming and increasingly severe extreme weather, including heat waves and the glacier collapse and flooding in Nepal that killed 1,300 people. Such events, he said, are arriving "fast and furious" — worse as well as more frequent.
"I'm temperamentally optimistic, but the dangers are extremely grave, getting more so all the time," said Gore, who has often been portrayed as a doomsayer by political opponents who are not scientists.
He remains confident the problem will ultimately be solved. The open question, he said, is whether humanity acts in time to avoid truly catastrophic systemic changes to the Earth's ecological systems.