Al Gore heaped rare praise on a Republican on Monday, hailing Ivanka Trump as a dedicated environmentalist.

The former vice president took two meetings at Trump Tower on Monday — one with Ivanka Trump, and a longer one with President-elect Donald Trump — and gushed about the future first daughter afterward.

“It’s no secret that Ivanka Trump is very committed to having a climate policy that makes sense for our country and for our world,” Gore said in an interview Monday night on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.”

“And that was certainly evident in the conversation that I had with her before the conversation with the president-elect,” he added. “I appreciate the fact that she’s very concerned about this.”

Gore said it was his “own concern” with the “climate crisis” that prompted his powwow with the Trumps. After the election, Donald Trump backed away from his earlier statements that climate change was a “hoax” invented by the Chinese.

Gore said he’s “protecting” the details of his conversation with the president-elect, in part to assure he’ll have Trump’s ear in the future.

But he characterized his meeting with Trump as “interesting.”

“I do think it was productive,” he said. “The meeting was a good one, I thought. We covered a lot of ground.”

Gore ran for president in 2000 and, although he won the popular vote, failed to win the Electoral College. Similarly, Hillary Clinton won more votes than Trump across the United States in the 2016 election.

Gore said Monday he believes American democracy can be “brought back to life” by getting rid of the Electoral College and “shifting to the popular vote.”

“In the last couple of years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the balance has shifted in my own way of thinking about it partly because I do think that we would have a chance to really encourage participation in our democracy if we went to a popular vote,” he said.

“It will take a little time, but I’d be surprised if we did not eventually shift to a popular vote for president over the next decade or so,” he said.