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Al Gore Said Something Funny at COP28

The former U.S. Vice President invoked Dickens in an interview with Bloomberg.

12/06/2023

Heatmap illustration/Getty Images

Al Gore is done mincing words. In a TED Talk this past July titled “What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know,” the former U.S. Vice President and long-time climate champion took aim at the major oil and gas producers. “They have used fraud on a massive scale,” he said. “They’ve used falsehoods on an industrial scale. And they’ve used their legacy political and economic networks, lavishly funded, to capture the policymaking process in too many countries around the world.”

So you can imagine how he might feel attending COP28 in a petrostate (the United Arab Emirates), hosted by a petroexecutive (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber), surrounded by petrorepresentatives (more than 2,400 of them).

Gore expressed some of his frustration to Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi in an interview for the Zero podcast. The COP requirement that all nations reach consensus gives oil and gas-producing nations too much power, he said roughly eight minutes into the interview. Except he said it funnier than that:

“The situation that leaves our world community in is that we have to beg for permission from the petrostates. ‘Please, sir, may we protect the future of humanity?’ ‘No, sorry.’”

You can find more excerpts from the interview here or listen to the full episode below.

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Jillian Goodman

Jillian is Heatmap's deputy editor. Before that, she was opinion editor at The Information and deputy editor at Bloomberg Green.

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