Craig Melvin to Gore: ‘One of the Positive Effects’ of Covid Is ‘an 8 Percent Drop in Greenhouse Gases’

MELVIN: “You just mentioned the pandemic, and one of the positive effects its had, one of the few positive effects, an 8% drop in greenhouse gasses because of those stay-at-home orders. How do we build on that progress, specifically, Mr. Vice President, as folks do start to get out more?”

GORE: “Well, that’s a little bit of an illusion because, you know, as economist Paul Krugman said, we put the economy in an equivalent of a medically induced coma, countries around the world have done that, and naturally the emissions are going to go down as economic activity goes down without changing over to other fuel sources. But we saw with the Great Recession a similar effect and then when the economy came back the emissions came back and most of the experts think that’s going to happen this time as well. However, this is occurring, Craig, against a backdrop of renewable electricity from solar and wind coming down to rapidly in cost, it’s now cheaper than fossil fuel electricity in most of the world. And with the mandates in many places to use the cheapest electricity first, we’re seeing fossil electricity go down even as renewable electricity is going up. Same thing with electric vehicles. Within a couple of years, they’re going to be cost competitive and people who try them already prefer them. So I think this is a time for a great reset. We’ve got to fix a lot of these problems that have been allowed to fester for way too long. And the climate crisis is an opportunity to create tens of millions of new jobs and clean up the air, reduce the death rate from pandemics, by the way, because the air pollution from burning fossil fuels heightens the death rates from Coronavirus. So this is a time for a reset to fix a bunch of challenges. First among them, the climate crisis.”

ROKER: “All right. Well, Mr. Vice President, Al Gore, thank you so much. We appreciate the insights and we’ll be talking to you again.”