It doesn't get much more visionary and ambitious than Al Gore's recent speech on energy and climate change, and this sentence in particular:

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.

If you missed it, you can find the full text here or read a helpfully annotated version here.

My only quibble with this fantastic speech was that Gore said little about the transportation sector, which is the second largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Changing our transportation policies and funding priorities could greatly help us address the climate change emergency. More on that after the jump.  

Common Dreams is currently hosting a self-congratulatory little article by Jane Etherington about how bourgeois suburbanites can make a "positive impact" on the environment by drying clothes on clotheslines instead of burning energy in dryers, and in response to my predictably sarcastic comment, someone asked me for a better "solution" than Ms. Etherington's pitiful, white-bread environmentalism.

Unfortunately, I don't have any "solutions," no matter how radical, and neither does anyone else. It's a testament to the nullity of public debate on this issue that anyone can even ask about "solutions," as if we were still living in 1964, when there was still a chance to avoid catastrophic degradation of the environment.

What we can do now is give future generations a little hope for partial recovery, and even this relatively modest aim would require a radical commitment equally repulsive to liberals, conservatives, and virtually everyone else except a few shock-troops from ELF and anti-whaling pirates from GreenPeace.

The first order of business is shutting down as many oil fields as possible, from Texas to Saudi Arabia, and denying any remaining fields access to global markets. Russia would defend its fields with nuclear weapons, but its pipelines to Europe and China are still vulnerable. Shutting down oil production involves significant military action, and significant risk of military retaliation, but there is no risk-free strategy that offers any possibility of diminishing the worst consequences of an already inevitable ecological collapse. If remaining oil reserves find their way into the atmosphere, however slowly, all conceivable counter-measures will be overwhelmed.

The second order of business is preventing further destruction of the rain-forest in Brazil and elsewhere, and none of the relevant countries will act without compulsion. The alternative is allowing lumber barons and peasant scavengers to finish cutting the lungs out of the planet.

The third step is replanting forests on a global scale, and transplanting most of the bourgeoisie from their unsustainable suburbs to mobile work-camps on the frontiers of desertification.

As radical and even absurd as my suggestions may appear to so-called "concerned citizens" of all political persuasions, not even the most radical program offers any prospect of "solutions" for us or our children, and all we can really hope for is a slightly better chance of recovery in the distant future.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. Jacob saw his first real fireworks display and loved it at first. We were watching from the 12th floor of a building right on the waterfront, so it was spectacular. Unfortunately, he was coming down with a fever and by the end was pretty unhappy. He is fine again now.

This was a big week, both locally where my friend qualified for the ballot for NYC's Sept. 9th primary election, and nationally where Obama's surge continued even as the Democrats once again showed less spine than we would like them to. More below.

HELLO!! oil companies, Democratic, and Republican members of Congress.  Apparently the aforementioned do not read environmental news or do not care about global warming since their solution to the oil crisis is based on the assumption that the real problem is either a shortage of supply or high prices.  Apparently these people do not read any analysis other than the mainstream media for their understanding of the impact of global warning.  Most of these people have children and grandchildren and it defies common sense that they would willingly bequeath a severely damaged planet to their loved ones.  So read other sources.

Harry Reid spoke bluntly on energy issues the other day.  Looking the Faux and Balanced cameras square on, he spoke truth:  

Coal makes us sick ...

This is an important statement.  Reid is speaking truth to an audience that isn't used to hearing it.

It's great to read right wing blogs, if only to see how their minds operate.

Discussing why "500-year floods" of the kind presently afflicting the midwest are apparently now occurring more frequently than once every 500 years, and whether global warming is a factor, righty writer Jonah Goldberg notes, "I'm entirely open to the idea that these floods are to some extent man-made (or man-exacerbated, if that phrase passes muster), I'm just dubious about the global warming part."  

(Because, you know, in righty world, global warming is a fraud.  No such thing exists.  After all, Rush says so, and he's a  real scientific genius.)

Yes, you read that right. First covered only by foreign media it has now been picked up by US media, CBS and CNN. They are saying that for the first time in recorded history the North Pole may be completely free of Ice by the end of the Summer.

This seems like a staggering development and although they are saying that it won't have any immediate significant effects, I for one find that hard to believe. For example what happens to the arctic wildlife such as Polar bears? And what about world sea levels?

Video below the fold