Former vice president and environmentalist Al Gore compared “climate deniers” to Uvalde, Texas, law enforcement officials who hesitated for over an hour before killing the school shooter who fatally shot 19 students and two teachers.
“You know, 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,” he said in a Sunday interview on NBC with Chuck Todd.
WATCH: Al Gore compares climate inaction to “failing to walk through the door” in Uvalde.
“Climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers … waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred.” pic.twitter.com/uu9fmTvvXA
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) July 24, 2022
Body-cam video released from the Uvalde school shooting shows law enforcement officers gathering outside the school while shots are heard coming from within the building.
Nearly 400 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School but they waited over an hour to kill the gunman, according to an interim report released by the Texas House of Representatives. There was a “regrettable culture of noncompliance” by school personnel before the attack regarding safety measures, according to the report.
Gore added on NBC, “God bless those families who’ve suffered so much. And law enforcement officials tell us that’s not typical of what law enforcement usually does. And confronted with this global emergency, 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. We do have the solutions.”
The former vice president then called on politicians to stop treating environmentalism as a “political football” or a “partisan issue.”
In a separate Sunday interview on ABC, Gore stressed record-high temperatures and wildfires in the U.S. and Europe as reason to act on climate change.
“They’re saying that if we don’t stop using our atmosphere as an open sewer, and if we don’t stop these heat trapping emissions, things are gonna get a lot worse,” Gore said on ABC. “More people will be killed and the survival of our civilization is at stake.”
President Joe Biden called climate change an “emergency” on Wednesday, falling short of declaring national climate emergency, in response to climate legislation stalling in Congress. He pledged to act through executive action to bypass Congress on climate change, including expanding offshore wind opportunities and jobs.