Al Gore wonders if 'bullying' Trump prompted Bill Gates to backtrack on climate [View all]

Source: The Guardian

Wed 12 Nov 2025 16.05 EST
Last modified on Wed 12 Nov 2025 16.10 EST


Fear of being bullied by Donald Trump may have prompted Bill Gates to row back on the climate crisis, Al Gore has speculated, as he slammed the billionaire’s new position as “silly”, and the US president for his anti-climate stance. Trump, “the most corrupt president in American history”, was “badly damaging the US economy” by pulling away from renewable energy and promoting fossil fuels, the former US vice-president warned.

“[Trump’s] already doing a lot of damage [on the climate],” Gore said, in an interview with the Guardian at the Cop30 United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil. “Maybe the biggest harm he’s doing is to the United States itself, and one figure now illustrates it. China is now exporting green technology to the rest of the world that has a cumulative export value that is significantly higher than all of the fossil fuel exports from the United States to the rest of the world. And that trend is obviously accelerating quite dramatically.”

Gates, a philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, made waves around the world when he publicly argued for pushing the climate crisis down the international agenda, in favour of more focus on health issues.

“The idea of slowing down on climate again, every climate scientist that I know and respect just threw up their hands and said: ‘What in the world is he thinking?’” said Gore. “When Trump was elected the second time, Bill fired most of his climate staffers and went to the White House and lavished praise on Trump, and then put out this series of statements last week that puzzled anybody who was really concerned about the climate crisis.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/12/al-gore-cop30-climate