Al Gore Likens Climate Change Deniers to Idle Cops in Uvalde School Shooting

‘The climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers in Uvalde, Texas, who were waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred,’ the vice president said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ Sunday.

ABC News
Vice President Al Gore speaks to Jonathan Karl on ABC's This Week on Sunday. ABC News

Vice President Gore, in an interview that aired Sunday,  equated “climate deniers” who are hesitant to take aggressive measures to address climate change to the law enforcement officers that failed to stop a killer who massacred dozens of school children in Uvalde, Texas.

“The climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers in Uvalde, Texas, who were waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred,” Mr. Gore said in a taped segment that aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “They heard the screams, they heard the gunshots, and nobody stepped forward.

“What we’re doing with our inaction and failing to walk through the door and stop the killing is not typical of what we are capable of as human beings,” said Mr. Gore, who is a longtime advocate of government action to combat climate change.

Since his vice presidency, Mr. Gore has focused his efforts on raising alarm about climate change, a campaign most famously documented in the 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Mr. Gore made more than one appearance on Sunday shows this week after his name came up during last week’s hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. One of the witnesses contrasted President Trump’s handling of the 2020 election aftermath with those of President Nixon and Mr. Gore.

“We have an example of a Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Al Gore, who faced a very similar dilemma,” the witness, a former deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, testified. “He strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court decision that lost his election bid and allowed President George W. Bush to take office. But he gave a speech of concession … where he said this is for the sake of the unity of the U.S. as a people and for the strength of our democracy.”

Asked about that decision in a separate appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Mr. Gore said it was not a difficult one. 

“All I did is what Winston Churchill once said about the American people — the American people generally do the right thing after first exhausting every available alternative,” Mr. Gore said. “That’s really all I did. The Constitution required what I did and there’s nothing really extraordinary about it.

“Was it personally difficult? Well, you know, when the fate of the country and the traditions and honor of our democracy are at stake, it’s not really a difficult choice,” he added. 


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