Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore has called for America to abandon all fossil fuels for the production of electricity within 10 years.  He envisions a combination of solar, wind and geothermal renewable energy sources to produce all electricity in the US.

A major challenge is to upgrade the US transmission grid to be capable of moving electricity from the regions where it can be generated to where it is needed.  But the US grid is old and needs to be upgraded anyway.  He says we should guarantee good jobs for workers, like coal minres, displaced by the transition.  And he says we can pay for it by replacing payroll taxes with carbon taxes.  "Tax what we burn, not what we earn" he says.

He quotes one OPEC oil minister on ending our addiction to carbon: “The Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones.”

Gore asks you to join the WE campaign at http://wecansolveit.org.  I've joined and I urge you too also.  As Mr. Gore says "We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws"

Mr. Gore raises imagery of President Kennedy and the Apollo project:  "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."  But for me we should end the Carbon Age not because it is easy, not because it is hard but because it will end badly for us unless we end it on our own terms.

See the entire text of Gore's speach in the attached PDF file.