fight against climate change u.s greenhouse gas emissions which are helping warm the planet came roaring back in 2021. the new data shows they rose 6.2 percent as the economy rebounded after the pandemic lockdowns fueled by a fueled rather by a rise in coal generated power and pollution from trucking former vice president that's al gore welcomed us to his tennessee farm he's been warning about the climate emergency for decades this is a passion of his you might expect him to be discouraged about the world's lack of significant action on climate change but in a wide-ranging interview
ben tracy found he's actually quite hopeful how big is the farm this farm is 400 acres okay you got a lot of land former vice president al gore took us for a ride in his electric atv those are mulberry trees to show us his farm where he's been living since the pandemic hit i bet most people don't think of you as farmer owl no i don't think so and truth to tell i don't have many calluses on my hands his team handles most of the farm work tending to the sheep and raising the animals that
help fertilize the land where they're growing everything from carrots and beets to a variety of greens all sent to local markets but this land outside nashville is also gore's climate change laboratory and then just push it in he's collecting a soil sample as he experiments with what's known as regenerative farming that means cut back on the on the plowing there are better ways to plant there's actually three times more carbon stored in the topsoil of the earth than all the trees and plants combined by plowing less and making that soil more fertile scientists say farmers
could help trap massive amounts of additional planet-warming carbon emissions in the ground job number one is to stop using the sky as an open sewer for all of this man-made global warming pollution and that's what's making the weather crazy and dangerous leading to all of the consequences that are on the tv news almost every night now he says mother nature is now making the most effective argument for climate action and he's encouraged by the rapid growth of solar and wind power and people buying electric vehicles in record numbers but the planet is still rapidly warming
as we continue to pump near record amounts of pollution into the sky leading scientists to declare a code red for humanity there's all this progress being made but is it enough a realist will tell you look we've done some damage some of it regrettably is not recoverable but we we go from where we are you want to avoid tipping people into despair because some people go from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about it it is as if we can throw a switch and save the future of our
civilization after attending the recent climate conference in scotland he says 2022 is the year world leaders need to stop talking and actually start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions some of the pledges are still weak and we need to measure what they're doing and we need to keep an eye on them it's amazing how precise this is gore is a major investor in a new tech platform called climate trace it uses satellites sensors and artificial intelligence to track greenhouse gas emissions around the globe from specific power plants and factories this is the middletown steel works in
butler county ohio to individual cargo ships and even forests which release all of their stored carbon when they burn gore believes this will be an important tool to hold countries accountable for their pollution what do you do with that data publish it we're not the climate cops we're maybe the neighborhood watch but our neighborhood is the whole world we're in constant communication with the scientific community al gore has been sounding the climate alarm for more than four decades first as a young congressman the arctic is experiencing faster melvin and then 15 years ago with his
planetary power point in the film an inconvenient truth it earned him an oscar a nobel peace prize and plenty of scorn from climate change deniers some people called you a kook for you know being too far left on the environmental stuff in a kind of unfortunate way do you feel like what you have been saying all along has been validated well i certainly wish i had been wrong and more to the point what i've been saying is really just channeling what the scientific community has been saying at the top of the film you say i've
been trying to tell the story for a long time and i feel as if i've failed to get the message across do you now feel like you've succeeded in getting the message across no i have not succeeded yet the crisis is still getting worse faster than we're deploying the solutions there is a remaining question about whether we will solve it in time [Music] he's still optimistic mainly because of young people all over the world now demanding change a lot of those young people seem pretty fed up with politicians yeah blah blah blah as greta says
exactly i'm with her we're sick and tired of it and we're gonna make the change greta tunberg and her fellow climate activists accuse world leaders of not doing nearly enough and this former politician doesn't want them to tone down their criticism i want them to in the words of spinal tap i want them to turn it up to an eleven feet to the fire absolutely and the more they can march the more noise they can make the more demands they insist upon the the faster progress we'll make i'm a firm believer in that i call
this a farmer-led movement and he still believes the climate crisis we created is one we can also solve the direction of travel is clear and i do believe that we will get there for cbs morning's ben tracy carthage tennessee boy thank you mr al gore it makes me want to go back guys and look at inconvenient truth again because when i first thought i was kind of like yeah okay but now yeah i was i actually was but now i think i'll see it with different eyes and the fact that he is still speaking about
it all these years later yeah and then really mostly everything that he says makes sense and has been true good to see him this way yeah and what he said in response to what he does with the findings he said we're not climate cops maybe neighborhood watch for the world yeah we all feel like that you don't need to have a badge and walk around and say i'm cleaning up the litter on the ground but if we feel like we're the neighborhood watch for this world that we live in we can make it a better
place we don't talk about it we don't get into it nearly enough he the way he communicates is really evocative calling this guy an open sewer gets to the point pretty quickly yeah how about the line code red for humanity we all need to pay attention and we still have a chance to fix it nice job ben tracy
