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Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice President and co-founder of Generation Investment Management, continues to ring the alarm that climate change and environmental damage is a global emergency.

“This is the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced,” Gore said at the Summit LA18 festival. “Nuclear war is the only one in the same category, and we’ve held that at bay pretty successfully. This is an existential threat to our civilization and potentially our species.”

Following the news lately has felt like a hike “through the Book of Revelations,” Gore said, given historic floods in Texas, historic hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico, historic wildfires in California. He was speaking at the Summit conference in downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 4, with moderator Jaden Smith, the actor and singer who co-founded the eco-friendly water company Just. There’s “practically a year-round fire season here now,” Gore said, because of the area’s increasingly dry climate.

“This is not a tomorrow problem,” he said. “The time for complacency is over.” We have tools to address it, he said, and “we’ve got to do it” because “it’s at our doorstep.”

The packed house at the Orpheum Theater, in downtown L.A., broke into applause as Smith amplified his comments: “It’s right now! It’s right now!”

Gore has been trying to draw attention to climate change since the 1970s, when he represented Tennessee in Congress and organized the first hearings on global warming. He wrote a book about it in 1992, and another in 2006.

He’s also made the case with money. In 2004, he teamed up with former Goldman Sachs investor David Blood to found the London-based Generation. Blood and Gore (yes, really) thought that research on sustainability, combined with regular investing, could yield better returns.

So far, so good: The long-only Lombard Odier Generation Global fund has generated an annualized 9.9% from 2008 through November 7, compared with 6.9% for its benchmark, according to its website.

Last month saw the 2018 Nobel Prize for economics go to Yale University’s William Nordhaus, who pioneered the economic analysis of climate change, and a dire warning from the United Nations that disastrous ecological disruptions may start in just 12 years in the absence of action to stop it.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said only “rapid and far-reaching” actions, in land use, energy, industrial emissions and transportation, would avoid an increase of more than two degrees Celsius in average global temperatures. The 2015 Paris Agreement, ratified by 181 countries, aims to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels.

Money flowed into ESG funds and research ramped up after the election of Donald Trump, to compensate for its movement in the opposite direction. Growing enthusiasm for ESG investing means investors will put more pressure on corporations to help solve the problem, and not to worsen it.

Wealth managers like UBS have said that investing for a more sustainable environment can help prevent a global climate no longer hospitable to civilization, and also generate returns in line with normal, global-future-agnostic investing.

And Gore’s Generation Investment Management firm recently joined forces with Canadian pension CDPQ to invest $3 billion in sustainable businesses.

Gore and Smith sat in front of nearly 2,000 people, mostly affluent young and young-ish entrepreneurs and tech workers. It was an audience that already believes in the science of climate change and doesn’t need converting, but who may have untapped resources to devote to help ameliorate it, at the very least via their various social media platforms.

The scale and urgency of the problem can be hard to grasp, Gore said, because the systems are so complex, global and long-term.

And because any doubts about the veracity of the science are fanned by interested parties, he said:

“These climate-deniers, funded by fossil fuel companies, they count on all the psychological tricks they can use to convince people, oh, we can wait on that. Oh, one-tenth of 1% of scientists don’t agree? Let’s wait on the one-tenth of 1%.”

Gore and Smith discussed their different approaches to convincing people to take the environmental crisis seriously: Gore leads with optimism, “premised on the assumption” that people understand the danger and that we have access to some solutions, like solar and wind energy, and electric cars. More investment and policies supporting those existing solutions will help them make a difference.

“We do have the solution,” Gore said. “We can solve this. But we’ve got to face the danger without letting it tip into despair. Despair is another form of denial.” Some people head straight for despair, he said, “without stopping on the intermediate step of solving the damn crisis which we have the capability to do.”

“I believe in democracy, I believe in a reformed form of capitalism, I believe in humans,” he said. “In spite of our limitations, we also have the ability to rise above our limitations.”

The only thing missing: “political will.”

But his hope is not misplaced: “Your generation is helping to lead the way,” he said to Smith.

“I try to scare them as bad as I can,” Smith said. “Honestly! Because the kids in my generation, they’re like, ‘I’m tough, I don’t care, I’ll be fine, I’m just going to skate for the rest of my life.’ I’m like ‘well, bro, if the skate park floods, you’re going to have to learn how to surf.’”

Gore ended the talk on a positive note: “Political will is really and truly a renewable resource in and of itself.”

“We have the capacity within ourselves to solve this crisis if we decide it’s the morally correct, economically advantageous, and politically feasible decision to make,” he said. “I hope each of you will make that decision.”