Al Gore warns worst of climate change will be felt by black and poor people

Speaking at a memorial to the victims of lynching, the former vice-president warned of the disproportionate impacts of global warming

Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned climate change advocate, has warned that the deepening crisis of global temperature and sea level rise – and the consequent spate of natural disasters in America – will increasingly affect black and poor people more than others.

Speaking at the opening of a new national memorial and museum chronicling America’s history of lynching and racial violence in Montgomery, Alabama, Gore said that the US could expect to see many more major disasters of the ilk of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria last summer.

The most vulnerable to the damage and suffering would be poor and older Americans, infants and children, and African Americans, who live in large numbers in urban areas where the heat island effect intensifies rising climactic temperatures.

Almost eight out of 10 African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-burning plant, are three times more likely to die of airborne pollution than the overall population of the US, and black children suffer twice the levels of asthma with 10 times the level of asthmatic deaths, Gore said.

The former vice-president to Bill Clinton, who famously won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election but was defeated by George Bush on the electoral college count, launched an attack Scott Pruitt, the beleaguered administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for whittling down safeguards and regulations on air pollution. Pruitt is fighting to save his job having become engulfed in a raft of ethical controversies.

Gore said of Pruitt: “I don’t know why he’s still in office, though I kind of do know.”

He went on to accuse big business of leaning on Donald Trump to preserve Pruitt’s job. “The big grifters depend on the little grifter, and the big grifters have contacted the head grifter and said ‘Keep him in there’,” Gore said.

The climate change advocate was speaking at a two-day summit organized by the Equal Justice Initiative, a civil rights legal group in Montgomery. Under its director Bryan Stevenson, EJI has created a new museum and memorial that commemorates the victims of racial violence in the US and looks at the roots in slavery and segregation of the modern epidemic of mass incarceration.

Gore called on his audience to remain hopeful that something could still be done to combat climate change in the US and beyond. He pointed out that the first occasion in which the US could legally withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change would be 4 November 2020 – a day after the 2020 US presidential election.

“If there is a new president, there is a 30-day notice period to rejoin the agreement,” he said.

Gore added that maybe it wouldn’t be that long before Trump left office. “We’re only a little over a year into this experiment and in science and medicine some experiments are terminated early for ethical reasons.”

In his assessment, Trump had proved to be less capable of inflicting damage on the environment than he had feared, Gore said. “In the rush to do what the big polluters wanted him to do as quickly as possible they have made a lot of mistakes and the courts are striking down some of their actions. We have a lot of resilience built into the American system. They are doing damage for sure, but I believe much of it can be overturned.”

Gore finished with an impassioned call for reforms to protect the US democratic system from the caustic influence of rich individuals and corporations. “Out democracy was hacked long before Vladimir Putin hacked it, by big money and big lobbying. In order to solve the climate crisis we’ve got to fix the democracy crisis.”