- Our democracy is threatened now, for sure, and there's a new number-one threat, and that is misinformation and disinformation.

I think that's intimately connected to the threat we now face in American democracy.

[soft music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I am coming to you direct from Davos, Switzerland.

For 54 years now, this Alpine Village has been home to the World Economic Forum.

It's a gathering of some of the world's most powerful people, heads of state, CEOs, deep pocketed investors, but even they don't see much of a match for the level of crisis the world is facing.

While main stage conversations all week focused on artificial intelligence, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and climate change, behind the scenes, most of what I heard involved deep concerns about the US election and the state of American democracy.

So I sat down with a man who knows a thing or two about that, former Vice President Al Gore.

Later, there was much ado about AI here in Davos, but are leaders asking the right questions?

But first, here's a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator 1] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [soft music] - Do you live in a red state or a blue state?

Until fairly recently, such a question would've made no sense at all.

Let's roll back the clock.

- The time has come.

You've seen the map.

We've looked at the figures, and NBC News now makes its projection for the presidency.

Reagan is our projected winner.

- On November 4th, 1980, NBC News became the first major network to call the presidential election for Ronald Reagan.

But what stands out to me about this clip is not the absolute drumming that President Carter receives, but instead, those colors on that map, states that had gone for Reagan are blue, states yet to be decided are that weird 1980s yellow, and lonely little Georgia, which native son Jimmy Carter had managed to hold onto, is red.

It wasn't, in fact, until the contested 2000 election between then Vice President Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush that major news networks agreed on a standard red state Republican, blue state Democrat map scheme.

That's right, one of the most iconic signifiers of Republican or Democrat identity, second only to the elephant and the donkey, is a modern invention, and one born out of confusion.

Let me refresh your memory.

On election night, news networks flip-flopped between calling Florida for Bush or for Gore, Gore or for Bush.

When the final election returned, it showed Bush leading the state by 536 votes.

That's out of 6 million.

Gore demanded a recount, suspecting that votes in Democratic strongholds had been miscounted.

And no, I will not be explaining what a hanging chad is.

Republican lawyers then sued.

They argued the narrow recount ignored votes in other counties, and the case went to the Supreme Court.

And in a politicized, highly controversial five-four ruling, the court sided with the Republican argument and ordered an end to the recount, handing Bush the election.

Now, by that point, news networks had committed to one red state/blue state map, because otherwise we'd all have gone crazy.

And here's another sign of just how different things were in 2000.

At this point, Al Gore could have tried to discredit the court's decision as politically motivated.

Heck, he could have urged his supporters to convene on the Capitol to demonstrate their outrage.

Instead, Gore conceded.

- Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it.

- What a difference 24 years make.

Not only is our country firmly divided into red states and blue states, but election results are now in the eye of the beholder.

Now, to her credit, Hillary Clinton did concede to President Trump very quickly in 2016.

But Democrats also spent most of Trump's presidency trying to prove that he was a Russian asset, #notmypresident.

And today, more than 1/3 of all Americans believe that Biden's victory in 2020 was illegitimate, despite audits in multiple states and dozens of court rulings proving the opposite.

In fact, the number of Americans who doubt the results has actually grown in past years.

Al Gore's legacy will forever be tied to his fateful decision to put the peaceful transfer of power over his personal ambitions.

He was also acknowledging the shared reality, as unpalatable as it might've been for himself, where George W. Bush would be the next president of red and blue states alike.

Hm, if only there was another way to express the concept of an unpalatable reality.

[dramatic music] - [Al] Our ability to live is what is at stake.

- Because if Al Gore is famous for something other than losing an election, it's alerting the world to the dangers of climate change, long before it was cool to do so.

When "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006, only two in five Americans thought humans played a role in global warming.

Fewer still thought it was a serious issue.

Today, that number is closer to three in four Americans.

While it might be feasible to deny the results of an election, it's another thing to deny that your Florida beach home is underwater.

See, it all comes back to Florida in the end.

Let's talk to the man who makes us confront reality even when we really don't want to.

Here's my conversation with former Vice President Al Gore.

Vice President Al Gore, thanks so much for joining us on "GZERO World."

- Thank you for inviting me.

- So I wanna talk to you, of course, about global climate, which is such an important, critical part of the agenda here.

But before I do, go back to home for US democracy.

2000 elections were incredibly divisive, determined by a partisan vote of the Supreme Court, political vote, but nonetheless, we had a free, peaceful transfer of power.

We did not have that in 2020, and it looks increasingly like we're not necessarily going to in 2024.

What happened?

- [chuckles] Well, we had a candidate who refused to accept the verdict of the American people.

That's what happened.

And the alleged crimes that he committed may be adjudicated in court if, as many expect, the US Supreme Court rejects his claim of total immunity, that he would be able to assassinate his political opponents with impunity and total immunity, which is, of course, completely absurd.

- His lawyers tried to skirt that I saw, yeah.

- Well, yeah, but the lawyers were put in a tough spot by their client's desires there.

But in any case, our democracy is threatened now, for sure.

And, you know, here at Davos, every year they compile this list of the greatest threats, much as you do, of course.

On the Davos list this year, there's a new number-one threat, and that is misinformation and disinformation.

And I think that's intimately connected to the threat we now face in American democracy.

These algorithms that suck people down proverbial rabbit holes, they're more like the pitcher plants with slippery sides, and at the bottom of the rabbit hole, that's where the echo chamber is.

And People who dwell long enough in the echo chamber become vulnerable to a new kind of AI, not artificial intelligence, artificial insanity.

And it is weaponized by those who are inculcating the delusions.

And you get QAnon and climate denial and election deniers, and that is a very serious threat to our ability to govern ourselves.

You know, knowledge freely available to free people is the basis on which we can engage in democratic discourse and challenge one another's views and reason together and come to a shared conclusion as to what is more likely than not to be true, and then use that as the basis of decisions.

But the undermining of the law, journalism when we have probably the best generation of journalists overall in human history, it's really quite remarkable, I think.

And the refusal to accept the fair elect results of elections that have been studied very carefully and found not to have any significant-- - Plenty of judicial cases all thrown out.

- Correct, that is, that undermines the authority of knowledge and puts wind in the sails of this authoritarian populist wave that is now a global wave, and there are many other causes for it.

But the misinformation and disinformation goes hand in hand with the dictator wannabes who want to overturn the authority of knowledge and put their will in the driver's seat.

- If we don't have facts, it's hard to have democracy.

- Correct.

- So, Mr. Vice President, if you don't mind, let's turn to an issue that's been very close to your heart for a very long time.

I come here to the World Economic Forum and I see hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in transition energies.

I see renewable energies cheaper today than fossil fuels in many places around the world.

It feels like we have come a very long way.

I want to see a future of decentralized, inexpensive, abundant, sustainable energy.

Do you see that future?

Are we on path for that future?

- We're not on that path, at least not the way we should be.

We have seen significant progress, there's no question about it.

And there is a lot of good news.

Cost of solar declined again year-on-year.

In 2023, another 50%.

It's really quite remarkable.

It's now the cheapest electricity in the history of the world.

Wind is not far behind.

And if you look at the newly installed electricity generation capacity around the world, 80% of it's now annually solar and wind.

However, the installed base of fossil fuel energy is so large and the overall energy consumption continues to grow.

With population and with new energy-hungry technologies like artificial intelligence, for example, we are seeing a continuing rise in the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

This is the heart of the problem, Ian.

The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis.

Today, we will put another 162 million tons of manmade heat-trapping pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet.

That thin blue line you sometimes see in the pictures from space, it's blue because that's where the oxygen is, and it's thin enough that if you could drive a car at interstate highway speed straight up in the air, you'd get to the top of that blue line in about five to seven minutes.

You could walk it in an hour.

And when you get to the top of that blue line, all of the greenhouse gas pollution is below you, and it lingers there.

On average, each molecule stays about 100 years, and so it builds up and it's been building up, and the total amount there now traps as much extra heat in the earth's system as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding on the earth's surface every day.

That's a ridiculously huge amount of energy, and that's what's heating up the oceans and disrupting the water cycle, melting the ice, and creating the giant rain bomb downpours and the floods and mudslides.

We are in danger of crossing some negative tipping points that could unspool the stability of the system, the climate system, that has given rise to the flourishing of humanity.

I'll give you two examples.

The Gulf Stream, which is part of a larger ocean current system linked all around the world, the leading scientists say that has now slowed by 30%.

If it flipped, if it stopped, which some scientists are seriously concerned about, because that did happen in the ancient 12, 14,000 years ago, without going into those details, Europe went back into an ice age for another thousand years.

The consequences of disrupting that ocean current system would be incalculable.

- So, we're experimenting in real time on humanity's future?

- Correct.

At the end of the last ice age, we settled into this stable climate pattern, which led to the agricultural revolution, the building of the first cities, and the emergence of the civilization we enjoy now.

All of which has been conditioned upon the set of climate and environmental parameters that we have adapted to.

We're in danger of radically changing those.

And we are also in danger of triggering a runaway phenomena because 1/3 of the landmass in the northern hemisphere is made up of frozen soils embedded in which are massive amounts of dead plants and dead animals.

If that is allowed to thaw, it releases-- - [Ian] All that carbon.

- Both CO2 and methane, and could create a feedback loop.

Now, here's the good news, here's the good news.

- I was waiting for it.

- [laughs] If we get to true net zero and stop incrementally adding to the amount of heat-trapping gas that's there, the temperatures will stop going up almost immediately with a lag of as little as three to five years.

Now, that's new science.

It's well-confirmed now.

They used to believe that it would keep going even after we reach net zero, but no, it will not.

And the even better news is that if we stay at true net zero, then half of all the human-caused CO2 and methane will fall out of the atmosphere in as little as a quarter of a century.

- Really?

- 25 to 30 years, yes.

And the long healing process will begin, but there's a big if in that sentence.

- You have to hit it.

- We have to hit it.

- You have to hit it.

- Now, the good news again continues in that we have the technologies we need to reach true net zero and stay there.

And the even better news is they're cheaper sources of electricity.

They don't have the co-pollution, the particulate pollution that kills almost 9 million people a year, every year from the lungs-- - That's why China started moving, is because they had a problem with air pollution.

- Correct.

India is now not far behind.

- They're facing it, yeah.

- Last year, 93% of all the new electricity generation in India was solar and wind, which is a remarkable achievement.

- In part because India and Pakistan have some of the worst air conditions in the world, in their cities.

- Of course.

And there are a range of other technologies and batteries, electric vehicles.

20% of all the new cars this year worldwide were EVs.

- In China.

- 50% of all the new two wheeled-- Yeah, China dominated that statistic, but it's spreading worldwide, and 50% of the two-wheelers are, new ones, are electric.

- India too?

- Yes, yes, it's coming on very rapidly, and that's part of the good news.

But we face a major, two major obstacles in really getting on the path that we need to be on.

First of all, access to capital for the installation of green technologies is not available in the developing world.

India's an outlier, and the foreign exchange risk, corruption risk, rule of law risk, and other risks in developing economies make it almost impossible to get the private capital that's needed.

All that new solar and wind, 86% of the money came from the private sector, but with the home bias, that capital stays mostly in the places it originated and the developing economies are kinda walled off from it.

The second obstacle, and this is really important and connected to the democracy narrative that we got into at the beginning, the fossil fuel industry and the petro states have been engaged in a massive campaign to block the progress that would phase out fossil fuels.

Of course, some of the large fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil for example, have engaged in massive dishonest fraud for decades, and it's all documented very, very thoroughly.

I mean, they took a blueprint from the tobacco industry when the surgeon generals reported, alerted us to the dangers from smoking cigarettes.

They hired actors and dressed them up as doctors and put them on camera to say, "Hi, I'm a doctor, "and there's no health problem at all "involved with cigarettes."

And a hundred million people died as they conducted that campaign worldwide.

Well, they're doing essentially the same thing on fossil fuels.

In fact, the American Petroleum Institute just announced a brand-new $100 million advertising campaign last week designed to convince the American people that a transition away from fossil fuels is impossible and must be slowed down, if not stopped altogether.

- So, what I'm hearing-- - That's pure greed.

- Fundamental challenge to American democracy and to humanity's future, disinformation?

- Yeah, absolutely.

You know, and it runs very deeply because the vast majority of the American people wanna ban assault weapons, but the Congress is pathetically unable to do it because of misinformation and disinformation and AstroTurf false grassroots movements scaring the hell out of elected officials so they won't vote the way the American people want them to.

The vast majority of the American people want to see bold action on climate.

And we finally got the IRA, but where, we ought to have a carbon tax.

I mean, you know, a carbon tax and a two-state solution in the Middle East have one thing in common.

We've known for decades it's the most important solution.

- That's what you need, it's not going to happen, yeah.

- But the political figures have given up on pushing it.

We also need-- - I think we'll get there faster than we will a two-state solution, by the way.

- Well, I hope we get to both of them, and I don't claim expertise on the ongoing negotiations in the Middle East, but I think that we may be reaching a point where big changes are becoming obviously necessary.

You know, Rudy Dornbusch was a friend of mine in the last century, and he had Dornbush's law.

Stated simply, he said, "Things take longer to happen than you think they will, "but then they happen faster than you thought they could."

I think we're on the cusp of getting to where we need to be on climate.

And I dearly hope that we will make progress on Israel-Gaza, on Ukraine, and on the other challenges that exist alongside the climate crisis.

- And on our democracy.

Vice President Al Gore, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

[soft music] - That was my conversation with Al Gore, who, for the record, never actually said he invented the internet as legend goes.

But even if he did, he couldn't have predicted where we'd be right now in our digital transformation.

Case in point, AI dominated conversations all week here in Davos, but was it for the right reasons?

"GZERO"'s Tony Maciulis has the story.

[upbeat music] - The official theme of the 2024 World Economic Forum is rebuilding trust in a fragmented society.

Unofficially, I can tell you three things mattered this week: AI, AI, and more AI.

There were about two dozen panel discussions that had AI in the title.

There's even, by the way, an AI house, hundreds of corporate sponsors selling their message on this new technology.

But are they actually building trust?

That depends on who you ask.

I asked former EU Parliamentarian Marietje Schaake.

[upbeat music] There are many conversations happening about AI this week, but I wanna ask you, are they the right ones?

- I think all in all, so many conversations are taking place that, sure, every topic is discussed.

I don't think there's any stone unturned when it comes to AI, but they are very much parallel conversations.

I would love to see more confrontation between the corporates that are promising, you know, heaven on earth through AI and those experts as well, academics, but also civil society leaders that are very concerned about what the harms are and will be in the future.

- Big conversation, of course, is about jobs.

And on the eve of this forum, the IMF published a report with a pretty staggering statistic, that as much as 40% of the workforce could be impacted by AI in the coming years, in developed countries even higher.

Shouldn't that be the policy conversation that's dominating this place right now?

- Oh, absolutely.

I think it should be much more prominent of a discussion and not only estimates of how many jobs are gonna get lost, because often these studies have a long time horizon, but what are the social implications, the political implications?

Because even a small percentage of job loss or the need to re-skill can lead to incredible unrest in society.

And I think we should not underestimate the impact it would have, not so much on the functionality of AI, but really, the ripple effects as they go through society.

- To that point, many have compared this AI moment to the rise of globalization in the sense that globalism worked for the people that it worked for, but it also created this very wide inequality gap in other places.

Do you see that potential with AI?

Is it too late even?

- Well, I think we already see it.

If you look at the concentration of capital, the handful of companies that are really the only ones capable of acquiring the amount of data, compute, talent, lobbying power, and investments to build out these large language models and to be key players in the AI space goes at the expense of others.

People have been laid off in 2023 as a result of AI, and so yes, it's happening, and inequality is a major concern that I think will be exacerbated as a result of this technology.

[upbeat music] - So AI was certainly the star this week at the forum.

Whether its role ends up being more hero or villain certainly remains to be seen in the very connected town of Davos, Switzerland.

For "GZERO World," I'm Tony Maciulis.

[gentle music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you see or even if you don't, but you just want us out of Davos, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

[cheerful music] [cheerful music continues] [cheerful music continues] [upbeat tune] - [Narrator 1] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator 2] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Narrator 1] And by: Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [bright tune]