Al Gore

Former Vice-President turned environmental activist Al Gore issued a challenge to politicians and policy makers yesterday. Gore wants the United States to commit to producing 100% of its electric power from renewable sources, like wind, solar, clean coal, and geothermal energy, within 10 years. Gore cited the rising cost of oil as well as the alleged impact of burning fossil fuels on global warming as reasons for his call to action. Currently, renewable sources account for about nine percent of the 3.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity produced and consumed in the United States.

"I have never seen an opportunity for the country like the one that's emerging now. I hope to contribute to a new political environment in this country that will allow the next president to do what I think the next president is going to think is the right thing to do. But the people have to play a part."

The people's part, of course, will come in the form of providing the money for the construction of all the new infrastructure that will be needed to implement Gore's plan. Gore's group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, says that the total cost of the project could range from 1.5 to 3 trillion dollars over 30 years. Gore dismissed the potential cost as, "an expensive investment but not compared to the rising cost of continuing to invest in fossil fuels."

Curiously absent from Gore's plan is a call to increase the amount of electricity produced from nuclear power. The U.S. generates about 20 percent of its power from nuclear plants, which produce no greenhouse gases, yet Gore does not advocate for more production from this most environmentally friendly method. He also did not point out the fact that the World Meteorological Organization has said that global average temperatures have not increased, and may have actually decreased, over the last ten years. Lastly, Gore did not address the fact that fossil fuel power sources will be needed to back up alternative sources like wind and solar, which cannot be adjusted to meet peak demands and do not generate power when there is no wind or when it is dark.

Al Gore came out for Barack Obama last night at a giant rally in Detroit. Some estimates had the crowd at 20,000. The former vice president gave a fairly rousing speech that threatened to overshadow Obama's (where were these oratorical skills back when he was running for president?). Watch for yourself:

What do you think? Does Gore's endorsement mean anything for Obama in the long run?

Al finally gets off the pot...

Just when I thought it was going to be a slow campaign news day, I just heard a report on MSNBC that Al Gore will be endorsing Obama tonight, in person, at a rally in Detroit. The report also states that Gore will request contributors to his Web site, algore.com, so pitch in money as well as time to the Obama campaign.

Obviously, this endorsement would have been better months back, but it can never hurt to have it. I'm not a believer that any single endorsement from any one person can make a difference, but this sort of ties up some loose ends in the march toward party unity.

I'm sure you PUMA's will disagree.

Al Gore told The British newspaper The Sun that he plans to make a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

Despite the fact that most people view the climate crisis as a very serious issue, Gore believes that little has actually changed since his 2006 hit documentary helped move global climate change to the forefront of international politics. He cited a recent study that showed the problem ranked near the bottom of a long list of people's concerns.

"I remember one poll," Gore said, "where it came under dog litter. People are more likely to respond to problems that can be felt – terrorism, traffic jams, anything that activates the responses in an immediate way."

In the interview Gore reiterated his plan to stay out of elected office. Instead, he plans to lead a robust grass roots movement in the United States designed to reinvent the infrastructure of the country with the most adverse effect on the environment.

"When the US does change on this issue," Gore said, "it will have a tremendous impact on the rest of the world. It's hard to imagine China and India changing their position if the United States does not."

China will surpass the US as the world's worst greenhouse gas polluter this year.

Last week some of Al Gore's critics interpreted his decision not to accept climate-change skeptic J. Scott Armstrong's Global Warming Challenge--a $10,000 bet on whose 10-year forecast is more accurate, with the money going to charity--as a lack of willingness by the former Vice President to put his money where his mouth is on the environment.

Gore refused the bet, but he has since laid those doubts to rest with the announcement of an aggressive and expensive public-advocacy campaign to which he's contributing millions of dollars he earned from the movie An Inconvenient Truth, the book of the same title, a variety of prizes and awards he's won for his work on climate awareness and his salary from the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.

With apologies to Queen, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?

I'm voting for fantasy, but that doesn't mean that the Gore option won't burn a bunch of news cycles between here and the convention. Jay posted on Thursday, and the story has gotten a few more legs since then. This article is sourced to "former Gore aides":

Former Gore aides now believe he could emerge as a compromise candidate acceptable to both camps at the party's convention in Denver during the last week of August.

Two former Gore campaign officials have told The Sunday Telegraph that a scenario first mapped out by members of Mr Gore's inner circle last May now has a sporting chance of coming true.

Added to this, we have the chin-scratcher of Gore's appearance on 60 Minutes. "Why now?", inquiring minds would like to know.

Mike Allen of The Politico dropped a tantalizing nugget in a post this morning. It appears Time Magazine's Joe Klein is floating a Gore-Obama ticket as a possible resolution to the fight over the Democratic presidential nomination.

The pitch from Klein goes like this:

Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. ... All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party-and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? ... A prominent fund raiser told me, 'Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place.

A former Gore adviser told Allen that a much more likely scenario would involve Gore making a strong closing argument to the super delegates for one candidate or another.

This week, Democratic Representative Tim Mahoney stoked Gore-mania when he told a Florida paper, "If it (the nomination process) goes into the convention, don't be surprised if someone different is at the top of the ticket."

Today is the deadline of the Global Warming Challenge - a bet proposed by J. Scott Armstrong, a climate-change skeptic who doubts the varsity of climate forecasting models upon which Al Gore had based many of his dooms-day predictions.

The challenge dictates that Armstrong and Gore each put $10,000 into a Charitable Trust Fund. Armstrong then proposes to forecast temperature change more accurately than any climate model Gore chooses over a 10-year period. Armstrong forecasts that global mean temperature will not change.

Gore insisted that he was too busy to enter into the bet by the original deadline, so Armstrong extended until today. Gore has failed to accept.

Of course, this entire ordeal is a political stunt. The cash involved is minuscule and the bet requires an excessive duration. However, it does illuminate a single point: Gore is willing to wager taxpayer money on his wild, the-sky-is-falling hypothesis, but he feels that personal risks are beneath his merit. I commend Mr. Gore for refusing to wager his wealth on such a bet, and hope that voters do likewise whenever the issue is brought before them on a ballot.

The Business & Media Institute reports that Weather Channel founder John Coleman, a well-known global warming skeptic, has come out swinging against his creation, and against the movement to mitigate the effects of climate change:

"The Weather Channel had great promise, and that's all gone now because they've made every mistake in the book on what they've done and how they've done it and it's very sad," Coleman said. "It's now for sale and there's a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let's hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information."

Setting aside the tornado of grammatical problems here, I'm inclined to agree with him on one count. Unfortunately, if The Weather Channel restricted itself to giving "useful weather information", its programming would consist of a 5-minute bloc, repeated all day long.

After the jump, a few more nuggets from Coleman, a little bit of analysis, a rebuttal by John McCain(?), and maybe a 5-day forecast.

While the Democratic contenders for POTUS camp out at John Edwards door and promise God only knows what to God only knows what SuperDelegates, that grand prize, the Big Kahuna, the golden ring of that carousel called Al Gore will just have to wait!

CNN's Political Ticker's sources say that his multiple-awardness will withhold his endorsement until after the primaries are over:

He's the most prominent Democrat yet to take a side in the presidential election, but two sources close to Al Gore tell us not to expect the former vice president to endorse either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama any time during the primary season.

The sources say Gore talks with both Clinton and Obama, and is on good terms with both. But with Sen. John Kerry and Bill Clinton both aligned to a candidate, Gore has a role to serve as the neutral elder statesman in the party.

In the meantime, the candidates and their surrogates can keep mining the Supers ™ for convention votes, like this 21 y/o SuperDelegate from Wisconsin, Jason Rae: