'A Convenient Truth'

MyDD post here. (Includes video of Al Gore's speech.)

Today, former Vice President Al Gore laid out his plan to address America's energy crisis. "The United States should be making all of its electricity with renewable and carbon-free energy in 10 years." Stressing the need for America to end its dependence on oil and coal, Gore laid out a plan for the country to "produce all of its electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources", a goal he compared to President Kennedy's challenge for the country to put a man on the moon. Utilizing Sun, wind, and eco-friendly resources, America can contribute to a reduction of the "threat of climate change", relieve itself from the economic impact of "rising oil prices", and reduce the "transfer of wealth to oil producing countries". "I don't remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously....America's security, environmental and economic crises are all related", Al Gore said Thursday.

But see this post also.

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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 said it would cost about as much to build coal plants to satisfy current demand. "This is an investment that will pay itself back many times over," Gore said. "It's an expensive investment but not compared to the rising cost of continuing to invest in fossil fuels."

He's undoubtedly right. Why dump a ton of money into "clean coal" when we could instead invest it into something that's renewable, from the wind, sun and other earth-friendly energy sources.

But here's the dilemma, the backers of coal are a strong lobbying group, they count Dems such as Barack Obama and Brian Schweitzer among their proponents. Likewise, the backers of drilling for off-shore oil are a strong lobbying group, and have plenty of Democrats advocating for it, as does the expansion of nuclear. And those three things are pretty much all of what Republicans want, while many Democrats want nothing of it anymore asap. . . .

The pathetic thing is that George Bush will have dumped nearly $1 trillion dollars into the desert of the Mideast war before we get him out of the office of the presidency. With that kind of money, imagine if we'd have had a president that took 9/11 as a mission to have gotten off of the addiction to the middle east's oil instead.

George Bush is a total incompetent and always has been.