Former US vice president Al Gore mixed doom-laden warnings about the climate with a note of optimism on Friday, as he told the Cop29 summit that "we are winning" in the push to produce more clean energy.
He used an impassioned speech to tell countries taking part in the UN talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, that the world had "all the technologies we need" if nations could find the "political will" to cut back on their use of fossil fuels.
Mr Gore called the rise of renewable energy a "near-miraculous success story" as he presented data on the growth of clean power, which made up 87 per cent of new electricity last year. Wind turbines could meet today's power needs 40 times over, he added.
"We have all the technologies we need, with proven deployment models, to reduce emissions in half in the next decade," said Mr Gore, 76. "It’s not a pie in the sky, moonshot-type adventure – these are all things, most of them, we should be doing them for other reasons anyway. We are winning on this front. We have these tools, and carbon-free sources are now providing more electricity than either coal or methane gas."
The US state of Florida, which narrowly denied Mr Gore the US presidency in 2000, now has as many solar panels than the continent of Africa, he said. "This is a disgrace," he told delegates, admitting he was "stirred up" as called for poorer countries to get a bigger share of the clean energy market.
New data
A data gatherer called Climate Trace co-founded by Mr Gore unveiled new city and province-level information on greenhouse gases on Friday, showing Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Houston and Seoul were the world's top-emitting cities. The tracker uses artificial intelligence and satellite monitoring to help trace millions of individual sources of pollution, such as power plants and factories, in what Gavin McCormick, who helped establishthe project with Mr Gore, called "the most complete picture of emissions ever".
Shanghai's 256 million tonnes of greenhouse gases were higher than those produced by Colombia or Norway, while Tokyo's 250 million tonnes would put it in the top 40 nations if it were a country. New York City's 160 million tonnes and Houston's 150 million tonnes would be in the top 50. Seoul ranks fifth among cities, at 142 million tonnes.
Top 10 country greenhouse emitters
The Earth's environmental problems are "getting a lot worse quickly, and will continue to get worse until we as humanity decide to organise ourselves well enough to take action", Mr Gore told delegates in Baku. "How long are we going to let this get worse until we decide to take action?"
Mr Gore became known as an outspoken environmental advocate after leaving the US vice presidency in 2001. His efforts to warn the world with a talk and slide show on global warming, which he said he had presented more than 1,000 times, were the subject of the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.
In his Cop29 address, he said the world should listen to scientists as environmental disasters including hurricanes and wildfires grow worse. He said predictions on clean energy had been underestimated, however, with solar power outpacing expectations by a factor of more than 400.
"This is a breakout, near-miraculous success story, the cheapest electricity in the history of the world," he added. "We get enough in one hour from the Sun to fuel the entire global economy for the entire year. It seems like a pretty easy choice."
