'Excellent chance' US will stay in Paris agreement: Al Gore

[WASHINGTON] The United States has a better-than-even chance of sticking with a landmark 2015 global agreement on climate change, former US Vice-President Al Gore said on Friday.

"I think that there's an excellent chance, far better than 50-50, that the United States will decide to stay in the Paris Agreement," Mr Gore said during a roundtable discussion at this week's spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Though they are major contributors to US carbon emissions, US energy companies have urged the Trump administration not to exit the Paris Agreement.

It took effect last year and aims to keep global average temperature increases below two degrees centigrade.

President Donald Trump has said he will decide by the end of next month whether to stay in the agreement but in March moved to roll back much of the regulation underpinning his predecessor Barack Obama's climate legacy.

"Solar jobs in the US are now growing 17 times faster than job growth in the economy," Mr Gore said.

Mr Gore, who served from 1993 to 2001 and lost a bitterly fought presidential campaign, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for efforts to raise awareness of global warming.

He wrote and appeared in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, about the threat of climate change.

Mr Gore said the US was in the early stages of a "sustainability revolution," with the scale of the Industrial Revolution but the speed of the current digital era.

AFP