(CNN) Former Vice President Al Gore said Friday that President Donald Trump's repeated denials of man-made climate change have inadvertently pushed more people to support initiatives protecting the environment.

"In what some might call a perverse way, I think the fact that Donald J. Trump has become the global face of climate denial is actually encouraging a lot more people to join the cause of helping bring about the solutions more rapidly," Gore told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on "CNN Newsroom."

Gore previously targeted Trump in his 2017 documentary "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power," framing the President as the villain in the follow-up to his 2006 film on climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore also had called Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement that June "indefensible."

Trump "cannot withdraw from the Paris agreement, by the way, legally," he added Friday. "The first date we could is the day after the next presidential election. So the fate of this issue is not in his hands -- it's in our hands."

Gore, who was in Atlanta on Friday meeting with young climate change activists, also expressed support for the Green New Deal as an ambitious program that would get people talking about overhauling environmental policy.

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