07.17.08
Gore issues GW warning
Gore asks U.S. to abandon fossil fuels
By David Stout Published: July 17, 2008
WASHINGTON: Al Gore, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his effort against global warming, said Thursday that Americans should rely on the sun, winds and other environmentally friendly sources of electricity, or risk their national security as well as their creature comforts.
“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Gore said in a speech during an energy conference in Washington. “The future of human civilization is at stake.”
Gore, who was Bill Clinton’s vice president, called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon almost 39 years ago, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal.
Gore said that producing all electricity in the United States from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” within 10 years was not a farfetched vision, although he acknowledged it would require fundamental changes in political thinking and personal expectations.
“This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative,” Gore said in remarks prepared for the conference. “It represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life - to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”
David Fairthorne said,
July 18, 2008 at 1:48 pm
As usual, Gore is exagerrating. And he is conflating two distinct problems; energy independence and global warming.
The evidence that human industrial emissions of CO2 are responsible for global warming is not very convincing. How does one explain the two previous warming periods (Roman and Medieval)? I highly doubt that there will be hundreds of millions of “climate refugees” any time soon (although the 12,000 inhabitants of Tuvalu may disagree).
But unlike global warming, energy independence presents a real and serious threat to America’s economy, with its huge current account deficit and its problematic relationships with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has a plan that would have cars run on compressed natural gas, and would generate more electricity by building wind farms across the windy mid-western states. See PickensPlan.com.