I wonder if he'd have been able to express the situation so clearly if he had been elected...

I think we all can agree that the purpose of government to to get bigger and take more freedom away from people. This is the last place I want to send money to come up with energy solutions.

The individuals in this country that comes up with a solution to our problem is a much better fit with me. they are going to look at all posibilitys not just the ones that benefit them and their capacity to attain more power like governments do.

There are scores of people that have energy devices that produce free energy, but they connot get the pattents for them because the people in power do not want us to be able to produce power without their control.

I would think the envromental movement would be searching these people out, providing investment money to them and trying to get government to give them pattents on their creation.

I think we all can agree that the purpose of government to to get bigger and take more freedom away from people. This is the last place I want to send money to come up with energy solutions.

The individuals in this country that comes up with a solution to our problem is a much better fit with me. they are going to look at all posibilitys not just the ones that benefit them and their capacity to attain more power like governments do.

There are scores of people that have energy devices that produce free energy, but they connot get the pattents for them because the people in power do not want us to be able to produce power without their control.

I would think the envromental movement would be searching these people out, providing investment money to them and trying to get government to give them pattents on their creation.

Wow, ten years? I'm all for solving our climate change problem (read: oil, coal, natural gas) as soon as feasible, but ten years seems... excessive.

Anyway, he seems to be presenting it more as a goal to push for, which I'm totally behind. If we've only shifted 50% of our electricity generation to non-polluting sources in ten years, we've still gone that far!

"There are scores of people that have energy devices that produce free energy, but they connot get the pattents for them because the people in power do not want us to be able to produce power without their control. "

Please cite your sources.

Anthony there is no such thing as free energy. You may have meant to write something else, but there is a reason why the patent office doesn't grant patents for perpetual motion machines. They are impossible. Now if you meant to write that there are people who have created sustainable ways of producing energy that are having problems getting a patent that's fine.

No we don't all agree the purpose of guv'mint is to get big and take away our freedoms (Though Dubya is doing a fine job in that dept). What Gore is saying we need focused leadership which we don't have. There are thousands of people working on developing better sources of energy and ways to live our lives with less energy and more sustainably, but it's not a coherent effort.

"There are thousands of people working on developing better sources of energy and ways to live our lives with less energy and more sustainably, but it's not a coherent effort."

Maybe a coherent effort is not what we need. Corn ethanol's pretty coherent, but a big mistake too. I think we need a shotgun approach with lots of different solutions in competition, and then we can see which swim and which sink.

What would *truly* make a difference from the politicians is not them trying to guide technology, but quickly phasing out subsidies to fossil fuels and maybe even putting a price on carbon in a revenue neutral way (cut income tax and business tax by same amount). Now that would be leadership and give good results.

"There are scores of people that have energy devices that produce free energy, but they connot get the pattents for them because the people in power do not want us to be able to produce power without their control. "

Please cite your sources.

You might try looking up an article found in the magazine Mother Earth News printed over 3 years ago, where it discusses how someone invented a car that used water instead of gas as source of power but the government REFUSED to issue patent... the fact is the auto/fuel industry already has the technology to create "greener" cars but they won't do it b/c of greed.

Simon, you might want to look at these, which were published here recently:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/genepax-water-powered-car-japan-debunking.php

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/water-powered-car-true-believers-question.php

This is from the American Heritage Dictionary: Coherent

Sticking together; cohering.
Marked by an orderly, logical, and aesthetically consistent relation of parts: a coherent essay.
Physics Of, relating to, or having waves with similar direction, amplitude, and phase that are capable of exhibiting interference.
Of or relating to a system of units of measurement in which a small number of basic units are defined from which all others in the system are derived by multiplication or division only.
Botany Sticking to but not fused with a part or an organ of the same kind.

I believe when we call for a coherent effort on the part of our elected officials, we are asking that they work together, not single-mindedly.

Well, if all that happens is they work better together, sure, no problem. But what usually happens is they pick and chose the winners (after much pressure from special interests), and after a few years we realize that it was the wrong choices and costly, etc. That's certainly more coherent, but less effective.

Free: I believe that the original poster Neil may have meant it in a more literal sense: if you have a solar panel installed, it's free energy (after paying for the panel). I do not think he means thermodynamically free. As for the car idiom, the water is free or nearly free, as opposed to gas/oil/ethanol from a commercial pump. Things that run on solar/wind/water/geothermal could be considered free as the natural resource is renewable/free to all.

I do not agree about his gov't comment. But gov't and civil systems of gov't/control/society are very embedded and we can't coup de'tat on them and expect to live in a gov't free world. Systems of social control will rebuild themselves.

But I do think the patent office ought to open up for the good of the world for a couple years.

Neil I don't agree. Some government control is good. I think that the government should only step in if people are too ignorant to take care of themselves, but isn't that the situation we're in now? Right now the anti-big government party (R) has made great advances in reducing personal freedom, civil rights and economic competition (air lines and oil companies). A big government socialist country like Sweden doesn't spend its time spying on its citizens and propping up failing industries. What the RE companies want is no subsidies for anyone. Right now the government supports the fossil fuel industry, hiding the real cost of energy and keeping renewable energy technologies from effectively competing

Orbital release of balloons like Echo 2 launched in the 1960's would block enough sunlight reaching earth (1.6%) to stop global warming dead in it's tracks and improve equatorial crop yields simultaneously. Of course, Al Gore and biologist boneheads haven't heard of thermodynamics.

"Neil I don't agree. Some government control is good. I think that the government should only step in if people are too ignorant to take care of themselves,"

What makes the govenrment less ignorant? Certainly not long-term planning, or impartiality, efficiency, or being smarter. Many of our current problems were caused by government in the first place: Road subsidies, oil subsidies, wars, political alliances with dictatoriships, creating barriers to entry for competitors to big established companies, etc. And yet naive people still trust the government.

"Right now the anti-big government party (R) has made great advances in reducing personal freedom, civil rights and economic competition (air lines and oil companies)."

You have to see the difference between the thing and how the thing is labelled. The current Republican party has very very little to do with small government. It is imperialist to the bone. You have to go back about 50 years to find small gov Rs, and back then, "all the wars of the 20th century were democrat wars", etc. There are no major small-government parties in the US right now. Just big, and bigger.

"A big government socialist country like Sweden doesn't spend its time spying on its citizens and propping up failing industries."

Do you really know that or is it just confirmation bias? And Sweden has been changing quite a bit lately, giving up on a lot of socialist things that simply didn't work.

Government is as essential as freedom. All major economic progress in the world has been a result of government, just like all creative progress in the world has been the result of freedom.

Of course, freedom is a more essential human right, because you have no economic progress without creativity.

Maybe Neil just has a problem with HIS government, whatever it is. I think such cranks can be readily ignored.

"All major economic progress in the world has been a result of government"

You, sir, don't know anything about history or economics. You're just naively regurgitating lines you learned in a government school textbook.

For the cost of the war in Iraq (nearing 1 trillion), we could have done this.... now America is broke.

"For the cost of the war in Iraq (nearing 1 trillion), we could have done this.... now America is broke."

Agreed. War never solves anything.

the war has mostly been paid by printing up money anyway, not by raising taxes. So a higher supply of money = more inflation, so everybody's paying for it.

Oil's not really that more expensive, it's that the dollar is worth a lot less.

I'm all for sustainable and environmentally friendly power generation but I have absolutely no idea how anyone can take this self absorbed lunatic of a profiteer seriously.

At least he is pushing the issue front and center. Nothing wrong with some pushing on important issues.

J

The goal of getting off oil is a good one, no matter who came up with it.

The goal of getting off oil is a good one, no matter who came up with it.

All these years and they have a BAD track record on nuclear power; and all this hype about new kinds of plants being better sounds like a bunch of hype no better than all those solar breakthroughs that have been 5 years away --the last 30 years.

Sure I think they are safe and we will be able to find storage eventually (FYI: that mountain is full due to extensions on existing plants that were not planned for; I heard this directly from the former head of the nuclear regulatory agency; who is pro nuke btw.)

Nuclear power is HEAVILY government subsidized and its a sure bet that anything remotely new will even more and may never break even when you include the total cost involved.

While Al Gore was challenging Americans to invest in a carbon-free energy future, Texas utility regulators voted to to invest nearly $5 billion to expand its renewable energy infrastructure. Read more.

Someone had to say what Al Gore is saying; someone has to be intellectually honest and willing to speak out loudly and clearly as Al Gore is doing.
Emergent and convergent global challenges, ominously looming before the family of humanity on the far horizon, threaten the future of human civilizations, life as know it and the efficacy of Earth as a fit place for human habitation:

the human overpopulation of Earth;

the pending loss of adequate fossil fuel reserves and other vital energy sources due to unrestrained international plundering;

the dissipation of limited resources due to reckless per-capita overconsumption;

the problems of global warming in particular and climate change more generally; and

the insufficiently bridled pollution of air, land and water as well as precipitating irreversible degradation of the planet's frangible ecosystems services due to relentless industrialization and unregulated economic globalization.

Who knows, perhaps necessary change is in the offing.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php