Al Gore: ‘We need to build a stronger digital immune system’

Former vice president of the US Al Gore – one of the first high profile figures to speak out about the scientific basis for climate change over two decades ago – delivered a rallying call to a crowd of 7,000 Swedish tech leaders and innovators last week, urging them to develop more tech that supports the fight against climate change.

Addressing a crowd gathered for The Tech Arena – the Nordic nation’s largest tech event at the Friends Arena in Stockholm – Gore made it clear that he needed the support of the technology community in the movement’s fight to help prevent global warming.

“I am here to recruit you. We need your help. I know that the many tech-orientated men and women in this audience are already working on those solutions. Those of you who are not yet – get in there and help us because we need you. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

The climate activist, who was the Democrat’s presidential candidate in the 2000 US election (a race he would lose to Republican President George W Bush), didn’t dive into specifics of how tech community might help – but it doesn’t appear to be through investing in more renewable energy technology solutions.

“We already have all the technologies in wind and solar – everything we need to cut emissions in half in the next seven years,” he said at one point.

He also expressed mixed thoughts on carbon sequestration – the practice of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and holding it in a solid or liquid form, which tech giants such as Microsoft have been banking on to reduce their Co2 footprints.

On one hand, Gore believed that soil carbon sequestration may be “one of the sleeper solutions – It needs a lot of work, but it does work.”

Later in his address, however, he acknowledged the process was categorised as a “non-improving technology” and feared that Big Oil – or, as he referred to the petrol firms, “the fossil fuel polluters” – will use the technology “to convince people that they don’t have to stop polluting, that they can just “catch the emissions as they burn them”.

Inconvenient untruths

Where there is a need for tech, it seems, is in combating the spread of misinformation by these so-called fossil fuel polluters who, Gore said, were falsely claiming that the widely established and verified scientific evidence underlying climate change is false.

More recently, the former Tennessee senator added, the climate denial movement has begun to spin a new narrative suggesting that the solutions are not affordable, not available, or don’t work.

“There’s an old saying in farming country in Tennessee: ‘If you see a turtle on a fencepost, it didn’t get there by itself.

“Well, it’s the same with all these climate denial posts in online publications that didn’t get there by themselves.

“You’ve got zombie memes intentionally put out there by fossil fuel polluters. And they are still doing it. Climate denial is designed to block the formation of a political consensus to save ourselves,” he argued.

“The fossil fuel companies and the petrol states are trying everything they can do to block progress through misinformation and casting doubts in people’s minds that it’s impossible to make the transition,” he warned.

As a case in point, Gore pointed to the victory achieved by the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, which managed to get more than 130 countries to agree to transition away from fossil fuels by 2050.

“The next week the biggest fossil fuel lobby in the US, The American Petroleum Institute, launched a massive ad campaign designed to convince people that it was impossible to transition away from fossils. It’s literally insane because we are threatening the future of humanity.”

What’s needed, Gore argued – and what tech could facilitate – is helping the world develop “a better digital immune system” and finding smarter, quicker ways to identifying manipulation that is intended to do us harm.

“Abusive algorithms should be outlawed. Ones that create the opening of the rabbit holes that suck people down into them.  At the bottom is the echo chamber and listen to it for too long and it will make you vulnerable to another form of AI: artificial insanity,” he said.

“That’s where you find QAnon and Climate Denial and even a resurgence of the Flat Earth Society – I mean, how stupid is that?”

Big Tech has its part to play in this Gore noted. As does regulation.

“These algorithms are the digital equivalent of assault weapons AR15s – they ought to be outlawed. What gives these companies the right to suck children down these rabbit holes and make young girls suicidal because of a distorted body image to create all these mental health disorders in the name of profit?”

Another obstacle holding the net zero movement back, said Gore, was the global system for allocating capital, which provides no incentives for developing countries.

“86% of captial for renewable energy ventures comes from private investment. But in developing countries, where most of the increase in emissions will come from in the next ten years, there are no financial incentives for investing in renewables,” said Gore.

“If you are in Nigeria, and you build a solar farm you will have to pay an interest rate seven times higher than in Sweden or the US. That’s crazy. The fossil fuel  colonialism still in full swing there.”

Again, could the tech ecosystem help here too? Creating fintech or blockchain solutions? Creating platforms that match VCs with the World Bank, other multilateral development banks and NGOs to provide a solution? Gore didn’t suggest this as such, but it’s a challenge that needs addressing.

Lately, Gore – who collected the Nobel Prize here in Stockholm in 2007 for his man-made climate change tome and Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, runs several initiatives all loosely linked to the single mission of saving the planet.

His NGO, the Climate Reality Project, trains climate grassroots activists around the world.

Gore also leads venture capital firm Generation Investment Management, which claims, “to look through the lens of sustainability and the opportunities through the entire ecosystem” and led the investment round for Sweden’s H2 Green Steel (“I wish I’d invested in [Swedish battery unicorn] Northvolt” he added during his address).

The influential climate activist has also mobilised a coalition of AI groups into an NGO called  Climate Trace, which tracks real-time carbon emissions that enterprises are using to rework their supply chains.

“We get hourly readouts from 300 satellites from eight different countries as well as land, sea and air-based sensors and internet streams of data and we use AI to fuse it all together using ML algorithms to give precise measurements of where all the greenhouse carbon emissions are coming from,” he said.