Former vice president Al Gore lashed out at the Trump administration in a fiery speech about the climate crisis, comparing its attempts to “create their own preferred version of reality” to that of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
Gore’s remarks at San Francisco Climate Week on Monday follow attacks on the current administration from a number of high-ranking Democrats in recent weeks, including former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“It was [Jürgen] Habermas’ mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell was, and I quote, ‘The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,”’ Gore said, according to Politico.
“He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’ End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” Gore said.
Former vice president Al Gore gave an animated and fiery keynote speech at San Francisco Climate Week on Monday, warning about the dire consequences of the climate crisis (AP)
The former vice president, who won an Academy Award for his 2006 global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” then rattled off a list of misinformation and misconceptions about energy that President Donald Trump or members of his administration have touted.
That includes claims that coal is “clean,” wind turbines “cause cancer,” natural disasters are a “scam,” and rising sea levels create more “beachfront property.”
Since taking office, Trump has reversed various Biden-era environmental initiatives that intended to slow down greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution, replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy alternatives and more.
Trump has characterized many of those regulations as a “scam” that hurt American manufacturing jobs and misused congressional funding.
Gore became more animated as he delivered the keynote address to climate activists, sharing concerns about the future of the planet under the new administration.
He called Trump a “threat” that the founders of the Constitution intended to protect the public from.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” Gore told the audience. “It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.”
