Al Gore: Voting Trump out in 2020 could save Paris Climate Agreement

Al Gore has suggested America could stay in the Paris Climate Agreement if a new president gets into the White House in 2020.

President Donald Trump announced he would be withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement in June, making the US as the only country in the world not to get behind the framework deal to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

The agreement states that signatories cannot withdraw until 4 November 2019 but the actual departure would not become official until the following year.

“If there is a new president … a new president could simply give 30 days notice, and the United States is back in the agreement,” the former US Vice President told an audience at COP23, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany.

Mr Gore added: “The first date upon which the United States could actually leave the Paris Agreement happens to be the first day after the next presidential election in 2020 so that's good news”.

But he interrupted his comments during the climate finance panel at the US Climate Action Centre with a quick pause before adding “Excuse me a moment” and bowing his head and folding his hands in prayer.

The former Democrat presidential candidate joked: “That was not a partisan comment there. You can't quote me on that”.

The accord was signed by nearly 200 countries in December 2015 in an attempt to restrict global greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to within two degrees Celsius.

“The United States of America is still in the Paris Agreement, and we are going to meet and exceed our commitments,” Mr Gore continued.

He said: “The United States of America is very seriously moving forward. This train, if you'll forgive the metaphor, left the station in Paris.”

Mr Gore, who gained an Oscar for his 2006 documentary about climate change An Inconvenient Truth, said it was unlikely Germany, Japan, and other American allies would ever succeed in persuading President Trump to reverse his plans to withdraw the Paris climate agreement.

The politician, whose world-renowned work in climate change activism with the IPCC gained him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, rebuffed President Trump's declared readiness to re-engage in the 2015 agreement if he gained better terms for US taxpayers and businesses, saying it was merely a “smokescreen".

"It's a classic political effort to have things both ways. He's made his decision but he wants to give the other side a faint hope that ... that he might yet change his mind," he told Reuters from the sidelines of the 200-nation meeting.

”It's pointless for me to continue trying to persuade him to change his mind," he said. "Can somebody else? (German) Chancellor Angela Merkel? (Japanese) Prime Minister (Shinzo) Abe? Somebody else? I don't know. I doubt it.”

Syria, the last nation outside the pact, became a signatory of the Paris climate agreement last week.