Al Gore says ‘climate deniers’ are like the 400 Uvalde officers who waited ‘while the children were massacred’

Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore has compared climate crisis deniers to the Uvalde police officers who have come under heavy criticism for their delayed reaction to an active shooter.

“They heard the screams, they heard the gunshots, and nobody stepped forward,” Gore said during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “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.”

“And 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,” he added.

Gore went onto express his frustrations that any motion to improve climate change continued to stall in the senate, saying that saving the planet “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

“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. And I think these extreme events that are getting steadily worse and more severe are really beginning to change minds​,” Gore said. “We have to have unity as a nation to come together and stop making this a political football​.”

Gore said that the attitudes of the US government have not kept up with those in society and also compared the failure to pass climate change policies to that of the failure to ban “assault weapons.”

“​O​ur Democracy is broken. And in order to solve the climate crisis, we’re going to have to pay attention to the democracy crisis​,” Gore said.

“The same reason we can’t pass legislation to, for example​,​ reinstate the ban on assault weapons​ is the same reason that we can’t pass climate legislation. We have a minority government. We have the filibuster, still, which ought to be eliminated. We have big money playing much too large a role in our politics, lobbyists for the fossil-fuel industry​,” he said. “We have got to rise to this cchallenge.”