by Joseph Robertson

Created on: July 26, 2008

Former US vice-president Al Gore is calling on the nation to marshal its resources and divorce itself from the combustible fuels economy. Gore says the US can produce all its energy requirements from renewable resources within 10 years, if concerted action is taken. The bold initiative is designed to drive debate on the topic and move discussions about how to deal with high fuel prices toward the new opportunity they provide for funding renewable infrastructure development.

According to the Associated Press:

Rising fuel costs, climate change and the national security threats posed by U.S. dependence on foreign oil are conspiring to create "a new political environment" that Gore said will sustain bold and expensive steps to wean the nation off fossil fuels.

When Pres. Bush announced he would lift the executive ban on offshore oil drilling and urged Congress to do the same, critics retorted that the science shows the potential energy output is too far off and too small to affect prices, but that new drilling would "enable" the nation's "addiction" to carbon-based fuels. Pres. Bush himself used the word addiction in a State of the Union address, to describe what could be a crippling reliance on petroleum-based fuels.

Gore's proposed initiative has been compared to Pres. John F. Kennedy's promise that the United States could land a man on the moon within the decade of the 1960s. Ecological economist Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute, has long called for the US to treat the climate crisis as a major threat and to begin to overhaul its energy economy "at wartime speed", referring specifically to how Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the industrial economy of the US to war production to fight and win World War II.

Gore has not shied away from the issue of cost, but points out that the cost is no longer higher than simply filling in gaps in current demand with new output from high-contamination fuel-sources like coal:

The Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan group that he chairs, estimates the cost of transforming the nation to so-called clean electricity sources at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 30 years in public and private money. But he says it would cost about as much to build ozone-killing coal plants to satisfy current demand.

Gore says his goal is to drive public opinion toward an alternative fuels revolution, noting how this process seems to have begun already as a response to soaring gasoline prices. The fuel-source issue has come to dominate

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