stradasphere

Gore's 10 Year Challenge

When John F. Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon in 10 years, many called it impossible.

Now, Al Gore has given a major speech with another visionary call:

"Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."

This is huge. For someone with as much stature and credibility as Vice President Gore to embrace a goal this big and ambitious could be game-changing. But first, you've got to see it for yourself. Click here to watch the video.

Can't you just imagine the media ignoring Al Gore's message? If we pass this along to our friends and family, we'll make sure people hear about this, so our next president will accept the challenge.

We all know high gas prices and our economic downturn is related to climate change and the war in Iraq, but no one is connecting the dots. Until now.

Here's a key bit from Gore's speech:

Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that's been worrying me...

Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges—the economic, environmental and national security crises.

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change...

But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.

The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.

Can we really get all our electricity from sources like solar and wind in 10 short years?

And of course, all this means more good jobs to re-power our economy:

When we send money to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day, they build new skyscrapers and we lose jobs. When we spend that money building solar arrays and windmills, we build competitive industries and gain jobs here at home.

With all the political posturing on high gas prices and drilling, it's amazing to hear someone being so honest:

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they're going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it...

However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.

It's truly a remarkable speech. Be sure to see it for yourself:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3945&id=13269-9224637-N.rTZ2x&t=3

posted by Unknown @ 11:01 AM