Inhabitat reports that Al Gore has a follow up to "An Inconvenient Truth" coming out in July - Al Gore fights climate change with “An Inconvenient Sequel”.

When Al Gore’s landmark climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” debuted at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, the administration in Washington was averse to climate change action. Eleven years later Gore has debuted his follow up film, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” at Sundance — just as Donald Trump takes office as the nation’s 45th president. Despite the dire prospects for the climate under Trump after eight years of modest gains under former President Barack Obama, Gore was upbeat in comments to the crowd after two standing ovations followed the Sundance screening.

When I read the first news report on this I immediately dismissed it as satire and ignored it - it was only after seeing it appear on a few news outlets that I realised that they were serious and the combination of populism and spite for Tony Abbott had led the colossus of the crossbench, coal baron Clive Palmer to join forces with climate crusader Al Gore in the most unlikely alliance I could possibly think of. As a result it seems the Renewable Energy Target, Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Australian Renewable Energy Authority may all survive the government's attempts to kill them off (Clive didn't go so far as to promise to keep the carbon tax though even that looks like outliving the 1 week Tony Abbott promised it would be abolished within) - Al Gore and Clive Palmer: behind the scenes of an unlikely bromance. I also found the conspiracy theory that Malcolm Turnbull engineered this during his dinner with Clive shortly beforehand kind of interesting.

The extraordinary Gore-Palmer drama began about 10 weeks ago when the quietly spoken but very effective former Australian Conservation Foundation head, Don Henry, approached a former adviser to Tony Windsor, John Clements, to ask whether he could open a line of communication with Clive Palmer.

Henry is an international board member of Gore’s “climate reality project”. Clements and Windsor had struck up a friendly relationship with Palmer during the last parliament. Palmer’s three senators held the key to the future of most of Australia’s existing climate change legislation. It was an unusual, but potentially powerful, mix.

Clements was sceptical – was the conservationist just lining up to have a go at Palmer? He was persuaded the dialogue would be serious.

Phone calls began, between Henry and Palmer and between Palmer and Gore. Would the Palmer United party (PUP) keep the clean energy finance corporation, the climate change authority, even the emissions trading scheme in a kind of hibernating state in preparation for tougher international action?

Just over two weeks ago Ben Oquist, now strategy director at the Australia Institute but previously chief of staff to Greens leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne and a canny political and parliamentary operator, flew to Brisbane to share a Japanese lunch with Palmer and his media adviser Andrew Crook. Should he meet Gore, Palmer asked, as the three discussed the details of climate policy.

The talks with Henry culminated in a meeting last Thursday at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra, down the road from parliament house, between Henry, Palmer, Clements and Crook, where the broad outline of Wednesday’s PUP announcements were discussed, as well as the idea of a joint press conference with Gore, who was already in Australia for a “climate reality” workshop. ...

Gore then wavered about the idea of standing at a podium beside the leader of a party that was promising to repeal the world-class carbon pricing scheme. At the last minute he was convinced to go ahead because PUP was promising to reintroduce the scheme in a different form in the near future and had also agreed to retain the renewable energy target, which it had previously intended to try to abolish, and which the government has been preparing to dramatically wind back.

And so it came about that Gore and Palmer, an unlikely duo, stood at a podium to announce the certain repeal of Australia's carbon pricing scheme and the very uncertain possibility that an emissions trading scheme would be reintroduced sometime in the future. ...

The carbon price will almost certainly be repealed. Direct Action is likely to go down as well. But some parts of the current climate change laws will be retained: the CEFC, the independent climate change authority and the RET.

The Guardian has an article on recent comments by Al Gore where he called geoengineering "utterly mad" - Al Gore says use of geo-engineering to head off climate disaster is insane.

The draft climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due for release in Germany in April, said governments might have to turn increasingly to technologies for "carbon dioxide removal" to keep warming below the dangerous threshold of 2 degrees. The draft said those technologies might involve capturing and burying emissions from coal-fired power plants, or planting more forests. But there has been debate in the environmental community over other more radical solutions.

On geo-engineering Gore drew a distinction between small-scale interventions, such as white roofs, and large-scale projects meant to extract or neutralise emissions from the air or block the sunlight. Those ideas, he said, carried enormous risks. "The most discussed so-called geo-engineering proposals – like putting sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere to reflect incoming sunlight – that's just insane. Let's just describe that clearly – it is utterly mad," Gore told the conference call.

He warned that such large and untested experiments carried enormous risks while "doing nothing to address other consequences of climate change such as ocean acidification". He said: "We are already engaged in a planet-wide experiment with consequences we can already tell are unpleasant for the future of humanity. So the hubris involved in thinking we can come up with a second planet-wide experiment that would exactly counteract the first experiment is delusional in the extreme."

Gore was also cool on the other quick-fix of nuclear power, advocated by some. ... Gore's re-thinking has apparently gone in the other direction. He told the call he had been an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear energy when he was in Congress. He was not opposed to nuclear energy now, he said. But he said the current state of technology in the nuclear energy industry did not yet warrant a big expansion.

Cryptogon points to a Chinese geoengineering proposal, aimed at neutralizing acid in the air ("Ph conditioning") with giant jellyfish shaped blimp membranes - Atmosphere Processors for Beijing [???].

In the past 30 years, China has suffered from air pollution and heavy haze created by fast industrial growth and economic expansion. An Environmental Chemistry Letter research journal article reviews the techniques for remediation of air pollution. A geoengineering method is proposed for mitigating air pollution and haze in China’s cities by using water to scavenge air pollution. Here, water should be sprayed into the atmosphere like watering garden. The scientific rationale and mechanism for the geoengineering scheme are explained.

Al Gore is kicking off a new initiative to try and get people to look at what is happening to the climate (as opposed to listening to a load of blind ideologues spouting random untruths in the conservative mediadrome) - The Climate Reality Project (via Bruce Sterling's 364 days of rampant climate delusion, who quips "You have to wonder now, not what happens when people accept the truth, but how people who deny the truth can maintain the psychosis. All the proper points were fully made years ago. Like, when you’re on the Governor’s staff in Austin right now, and you prayed for rain months ago and none arrived, and the soil is so dry that sewer pipes are cracking in the dessicated, shrinking turf, how do you go home and sleep? I mean, it’s your own home. It’s not like Murdoch’s propaganda waters your lawn").

This year, we have seen historic droughts, heat waves and floods. We’re experiencing record-high temperatures across much of the United States. This extreme weather is being called the “new normal.” But there’s nothing normal about it.



We recently introduced you to The Climate Reality Project. Our new focus is to help citizens around the world discover the truth about climate change and take meaningful steps toward solutions. We’re launching with a groundbreaking, global event called 24 Hours of Reality.



Join us for 24 Hours of Reality. RSVP on Facebook to show the world what can change in a day.

Beginning in Mexico City and proceeding around the globe, 24 Hours of Reality will offer a round-the-clock snapshot of the climate crisis, sharing unique perspectives from Tonga to Cape Verde, from Jakarta to London. On September 14-15, we will bring the world together to reveal the full truth, scope and impact of the climate crisis.



We’ll hear from the people and places witnessing firsthand the devastation of extreme weather events. I’m joining 23 Climate Presenters from around the globe to deliver a new multimedia presentation that will broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. The entire 24 hours will be streamed live online from start to finish.



Click here to learn more about 24 Hours of Reality and find the event in your time zone:

 http://climaterealityproject.org/



The climate crisis is a global problem we all share. And real solutions can only come when we address it together. Join me on September 14, and find out what can change in a day.



Bruce also has some more on the drought in Texas from the American Statesman - Climate change cracking foundations of Texas capital city.

“With heat unrelentingly beating down on Central Texas, shrinking, dried-out soils are emerging as a threat to infrastructure. Waterlines are breaking, and calls are up at home foundation firms as moisture is sucked out of area soils.

“On Monday, the temperature in Austin reached 105 degrees for the second consecutive day, marking the ninth straight day of triple-digit heat and the 41st of the year, forecasters said.

“The next several days will likely be the warmest days we have seen since mid-June,” National Weather Service forecaster Paul Yura said in an email. “Unfortunately no ‘major’ changes appear on the horizon.”

Real relief from high temperatures may not come for a month. At the current pace, Austin could come close to the record 69 triple-digit days of 1925 and the 68 triple-digit days of 2009 . “Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside,” the weather service cautions.

“Even as the drought takes an obvious toll on people — between Saturday and Monday afternoon, four people were taken to hospitals in heat-related incidents, according to Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services spokesman Warren Hassinger — it is slowly causing problems for infrastructure.

“The Austin Water Utility has had to respond to roughly 15 more broken waterline calls a week this summer than in an average summer week", said spokesman Jason Hill. The chief culprit is the lack of rain.

“The ground begins to dry out and shift,” he said. “A good portion of the ones we’re seeing are the small lines, from the water mains to homes. Typically the utility responds to 35 to 40 broken line calls a week. This summer, the utility is averaging 55 calls a week, he said.

True Slant has an intersting (albeit insane) idea for dealing with BP's ever-growing environmental disaster in the gulf of mexico, proposing that they follow the Soviet example and nuke the leaking well head - Nuke that slick.

As BP prepares to lower a four-story, 70-ton dome over the oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, the Russians — the world’s biggest oil producers — have some advice for their American counterparts: nuke it.

Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: “the underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.”

Yes! It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities. The first happened in Uzbekistan, on September 30, 1966 with a blast 1.5 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and at a depth of 1.5 kilometers. KP also notes that subterranean nuclear blasts were used as much as 169 times in the Soviet Union to accomplish fairly mundane tasks like creating underground storage spaces for gas or building canals.

These kinds of surgical strikes to shut off underground leaks, however, were carried out only five times, with the last one occuring in 1979. And there was only one misfire, near Kharkov, Ukraine, where a nuclear blast was unable to stanch a gas leak.

Al Gore has an article in The New Republic arguing that "the oil spill could change everything" - The Crisis Comes Ashore.

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life." His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”

However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful changes—directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood markets nationwide.

And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and Iran’s relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.

The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the prospect of the world’s sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished.

I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan—and even last week’s attempted bombing in Times Square—to a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.

Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop deep reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial.

Information Is Beautiful has some interesting visualisations of how much oil is leaking into the gulf - In Deep Water: Can we afford to spill any oil?.

The Juice Media has an interesting debate between Al Gore and Lord Monckton about global warming - Climate Coup - Lord Monckton rap battles Al Gore - Rap News.

C;eantech.com reports that Al Gore has been talking up smart and super grids at a recent venture capital conference - Al Gore: Super grid is critical to combating the climate crisis.

The used-to-be next president of the United States, as he calls himself, is all for putting a price on carbon, a cap and trade system, and overcoming political obstacles to combat climate change.

But what the American environmentalist and venture capitalist Al Gore—who has won everything from the Nobel Peace Prize to an Academy Award and Grammy for his documentary and book "The Inconvenient Truth"—came to San Mateo, Calif., yesterday to talk about was the super grid.

He said the smart grid is "at the heart" of developing renewable energy and empowering people to get to higher levels of efficiency.

Gore was the final keynote speaker at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat 2009 conference, focused on the smart grid. He also managed to plug the release of his new book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” which outlines what he thinks needs to happen to achieve a super grid—a revamped electrical grid aimed at saving energy, diversifying energy sources, and decarbonizing power use to slow global warming.

“This roller coaster is about to crash, and we are in the front car,” he said, of America's dependence on foreign oil and dwindling new discoveries of it.

Grist has a review of Al Gore's new book "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis" by Joe Romm - The must-read solutions book by Al Gore.

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday, Nov. 3. If you want a preview, Al Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. ...

Our Choice is really the anti-SuperFreakonomics. I’m sure it will be widely attacked by the deniers and delayers, so no doubt I’ll be blogging about it more this month. The bottom line is that besides being informative, Our Choice is a truly beautiful book page after page, and I highly recommend it, particularly for those who want a broad overview of the key strategies for preserving a livable climate.

CBS reports that Al Gore has a new, solutions oriented book coming ou on global warming - Al Gore Writes Book On Climate Change.

Environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore plans to release a new book, “Our Choice,” in November of 2009.

The book will “answer the call” for “urgent action” on a “comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis,” according to a press release.

Gore hopes that the book will “unquestionably inspire and rally those ready to fight for solutions that were deemed impossible only a short time ago.” He plans to lay out the conclusions he has reached after attending a number of “Solutions Summits” focused on the climate attended by policy experts, scientists and engineers.

Red, Green And Blue has a post on Al Gore's address to the Clinton Global Initiative - Al Gore Calls for “Civil Disobedience” to Stop Construction of New Coal-Fired Power Plants.

After introductory remarks by former President Bill Clinton, Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg, and cyclist Lance Armstrong, Al Gore launched a familiar-sounding polemic against carbon-based fuels with an intensified focus on the dishonest - and perhaps illegal - actions of the “carbon lobby.” ...

Gore said for the carbon lobby to be trying to convince their stockholders that renewable energy is risky business and that climate change is a hoax, they are purporting a type of stock fraud that should be addressed by attorneys general across the country.

In terms of the regulatory and legislative actions that would move us towards de-carbonizing our energy infrastructure, Gore reiterated his support for a carbon tax that would move us away from an income tax. “Tax what we burn, not what we earn,” said Gore, to resounding applause.

Mr. Gore’s attack on coal was clear and forceful. “Clean coal is like healthy cigarettes - it does not exist,” he said. But Gore also added that if we can sequester coal, than okay. But since the technology does not exist right now, we shouldn’t be pretending it is a solution.

Gore called on the young people in the United States to reject new coal-fired power plants. “It’s time for civil disobedience to stop the construction of new coal plants,” implored the former Vice-President.

When pushed by President Clinton to elaborate the quickest and most cost-effective way to utilize our vast renewable resources, Gore said that we need to start with expanding what he calls the “electranet.” A focus on expanding our renewable capacity would be centered on growing a smart grid - including an underground transmission infrastructure - that could and should be coupled with an expansion of this country’s lagging broadband infrastructure.

“This should be the number one infrastructure program in this country,” said Gore.

Gar Lipow and John Rynn at grist have been running the numbers on switching the US over to 100% clean energy, and have decided Gore's plan isn't ambitious enough - Gore's plan is more than 100 percent feasible.

Everyone is talking about Gore's proposal to decarbonize electricity over the course of 10 years.

Without considering transmission and storage losses, Gore's estimate of $1.5 to 3 trillion would require capital costs of under 37 to 74 cents per annual kWh. Taking those losses into consideration, cost would have to be more in the 28 to 56 cents per kWh range. (Note again these are not cost per watt of capacity. These are costs per annual kWh. They are levelized costs translated into capital numbers.) Jon Rynn and I have a worksheet in process on costs to 95 percent decarbonize economy, rather than 100 percent decarbonizing the grid. But it does include 99 percent decarbonizing the Grid, including a 30 percent redundancy to handle annual variations. The bottom price with the most aggressive improvements we looked at came to 66 cents per annual kWh. That comes out to $3.54 trillion, about $540 billion more than Gore budgets. But because biomass has proven so devastating ecologically, and so disastrous to the poor we assume very little use of biomass. Also we phase out nuclear as well as fossil fuels, something I'm pretty sure Gore does not. More nuclear and biomass not only reduce the amount electricity that needs to be generated, but it also reduces the need for storage losses. So Gore's plan does pencil out at the high end with 100 percent fossil-fuel free electricity at under $3 trillion.

If you follow our plan you would probably see the grid more like 90 percent decarbonized in first 10 years. But you would also see 85 percent of truck freight shifted to mostly electrified trains, construction of light rail, and massive reductions of emissions in residences, commercial buildings, and industrial use. So we reduce emissions by more than Gore's proposal, and reduce oil use significantly too, something Gore's plan would not do. So not only is Gore's plan feasible over a 10 year period, much greater reductions are feasible than Gore calls for over a 10 year period. Gore remains, as he as always has been, a mainstream centrist. That so much of the environmental community and netroots chooses to back away from it as "almost feasible" or "a moonshot," that is, as too radical, says something about their timidity.

Al Gore's speech yesterday was a masterpiece from my point of view - outlining most of the solutions to our energy issues (fixing and expanding the grids, energy efficiency, solar, wind, geothermal, electric cars etc etc etc) and many of the political factors involved (especially Iraq and the defenders of the status quo who took us there, and the culture war that has paralysed America).

Best of all (unlike "An Inconvenient Truth") he set an ambitious target for implementing the solutions - a switch to 100% renewable energy by 2020 for the United States (none of this 20% by 2020 nonsense that the weak-kneed keep offering up as a way forward) - something we should be attempting globally.

The speech is online now.

It was interesting that one of the people he thanked for attending was the Libertarian candidate for President - hopefully the libertarians are all starting to get on board with the idea of market based solutions to global warming and peak oil.

From The New York Times' review - Gore Calls for Carbon-Free Electric Power.

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts. “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. “The future of human civilization is at stake.”

Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal. He said the goal of producing all of the nation’s electricity from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” within 10 years is not some farfetched vision, although he said it would require fundamental changes in political thinking and personal expectations.

“This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative,” Mr. Gore said in his remarks at the conference. “It represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life — to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Although Mr. Gore has made global warming and energy conservation his signature issues, winning a Nobel Prize for his efforts, his speech on Thursday argued that the reasons for renouncing fossil fuels go far beyond concern for the climate.

In it, he cited military-intelligence studies warning of “dangerous national security implications” tied to climate change, including the possibility of “hundreds of millions of climate refugees” causing instability around the world, and said the United States is dangerously vulnerable because of its reliance on foreign oil. ...

Mr. Gore said the most important policy change in the transformation would be taxes on carbon dioxide production, with an accompanying reduction in payroll taxes. “We should tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.

The former vice president said in his speech that he could not recall a worse confluence of problems facing the country: higher gasoline prices, jobs being “outsourced,” the home mortgage industry in turmoil. “Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse,” he said.

By calling for new political leadership and speaking disdainfully of “defenders of the status quo,” Mr. Gore was hurling a dart at the man who defeated him for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush. Critics of Mr. Bush say that his policies are too often colored by his background in the oil business.

A crucial shortcoming in the country’s political leadership is a failure to view interlocking problems as basically one problem that is “deeply ironic in its simplicity,” Mr. Gore said, namely “our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels.”

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet,” Mr. Gore said. “Every bit of that’s got to change.”

And it can change, he said, citing some scientists’ estimates that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth in 40 minutes to meet the world’s energy needs for a year, and that the winds that blow across the Midwest every day could meet the country’s daily electricity needs.

More at the FT - Gore seeks 100% green energy.

Energy Bulletin has a transcript of the speech.

Jerome Guillet has a run down of how the solution could be implemented at TOD, focussing primarily on wind power, which is his area of expertise (I think he greatly understates the potential for solar in the time frame available) - Gore sets goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2020.

Al Gore has made a major speech in Washington this morning, setting out an ambitious goal for the USA to produce all of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2020. I thought I'd comment on the technical feasibility of the plan, and the underlying economics of such an endeavour.

The short answer is: while 100% is probably unrealistic, it's not unreasonable to expect to be able to get pretty close to that number (say, in the 50-90% range) in that timeframe, and it is very likely that it makes a LOT of sense economically. ...

For the simplicity of this discussion, I will focus on wind, given that it presents a bigger challenge on the intermittency front (which the inclusion of solar can only help improve), and that it would drive the ecohnomics of such a plan given its larger scale deployment.

The main questions, of course are as follows:
1) is it technically feasible to build the requisite capacity within 12 years?
2) what will it cost, and what will it mean for power prices?
3) how can the intermittency issue be dealt with?

Technical feasibility

To get 2,000 TWh of electricity from wind, roughly 800GW of wind power capacity would be needed, considering that windfarms would get an annual production equivalent to 2,500 full hours (a pretty conservative estimate, given that the existing wind farms are closer to 3,000 hours today). 800GW is roughly equal to 30 times the currently installed capacity (which should reach about 23GW at the end of this year) and 100 times the capacity installed in 2008 (expected to be close to 8,000MW, after 5,000MW were installed in 2007).

To build 800 GW in 12 years would require a significant increase in annual installations - but actually not an unrealistic one. ...

Altogether, the plan would require boosting investment in wind production capacity to about $100-150 billion per year, a significant number but hardly one that would require a complete retooling of the US economy. With a stable regulatory framework (presumably provided if this were made a national priority) and guaranteed demand (which could come via very simple mechanisms, like a feed-in tariffs, ie mandatory purchases by local utilities at regulated rates), there is absolutely no reason to doubt that this could be done.

I'll address the requirement to boost the grid separately below.

Wind power economics are quite simple: most of the levelised production cost per MWh comes from the initial investment. It is thus naturally sensitive to investment costs, and even more so to financing costs, both of which are determined at the time of construction. Once a windfarm is built, its production costs are essentially set for the rest of its operating life, ie 20-25 years. The fixed nature of its cost base makes it a difficult bet in a deregulated universe, where prices can swing wildy (including to low prices that can be insufficient for the windfarm to service its debt burden, thus the requirement for feed-in tariffs or similar mechanisms to guarantee a floor to wind electricity). But such fixed prices make wind a great proposition at times of increasing oil&gas costs: wind power prices will NOT increase even if oil & gas or coal prices continue to go up, as is quite possible.

Thus wind power is a wonderful hedge against future energy prices. And given that today it already costs less than power from a ges-fired plant (the plants that typically drive the price of electricity on wholesale markets), it is both competitive and likely to remain so in the coming years.

And given the cost structure of wind, a very simple way for government to support wind at very little cost would be to provide funding for the sector at low interest rates. One big advantage of government is its ability to borrow at lower rates - indeed, government sets the lowest rates that are by the rest of the economy. By passing on its low cost of funding to wind developments, the final cost of wind power could be lowered significantly, and passed on to consumers (banks would still be required to hold onto operational and other risks linked to wind production, they would just get cheaper funding for that specific purpose, which the'd have to fully pass on to projects. Germany has successfully used such a mechanism for years).

Studies in Germany and Denmark show that wind power lowers wholesale prices by 30 to 70% when wind blows, and that the overall savings for consumers far outstrip the cost of guaranteeing to wind producers a regulated tariff. Ironically, the more wind power there is in the system, and the lower the wholesale marker price will be most of the time, which means that the regulated tariff remains a necessity to ensure that wind producers are able to pay off the debt linked to their initial investment. But that regulated tariff is known, is realtively low, and,again, will not need to increase over time, thus ensuring to consumers similarly stable retail prices. ...

Overall, network operators with actual wind experience seem confident that a combination of additional investment, smart grid management, and maintaining available (but not using much) a large gas-fired capacity can make it possible to cope with large amounts of wind power in the system.

While a goal of 100% of carbon-free electricity is probably unrealistic, it therefore seems possible to get pretty close to that, especially if nuclear and hydro are included in the mix. A plan that announced a specific goal of 40-50% of wind-generated electricity by 2020 and 10-20% of solar, with the appropriate feed-in mechanisms, demand guarantees for manufacturers and investment in the grid would therefore be realistic, make economic sense, and fulfill two major strategic goals: reduce carbon emissions, and lower fossil fuel demand.

Al Gore is warning investors in carbon emitting industries that their investments will become the equivalent of the financial sector's subprime loans - worthless items that cause a great deal of financial harm.

Al Gore advised Wall Street leaders and institutional investors Thursday to ditch businesses too reliant on carbon-intensive energy — or prepare for huge losses down the road.

"You need to really scrub your investment portfolios, because I guarantee you — as my longtime good redneck friends in Tennessee say, I guarandamntee you — that if you really take a fine-tooth comb and go through your portfolios, many of you are going to find them chock-full of subprime carbon assets," the former vice president said.

Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the leading component of "greenhouse gases," which scientists say are playing a key role in warming the globe.

Gore's remarks before a high-profile business crowd that collectively controls some $20 trillion in capital were intended to unleash a financial ripple effect that could force the world to start putting a price on carbon emissions.

Gore, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to warn about climate change, compared the financial risks facing investors in carbon-using industries with the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages given to people with blemished credit records or low incomes.

"Similarly, the assumption that you can safely invest in assets that come from business models that assume carbon is free is an assumption that is about to go splat," he said. "You have lots of assets, many of you do, in your portfolios right now that truly do deserve that epithet 'subprime.'"

The U.N. played host to nearly 500 prominent financial leaders and institutional investors who came searching for insights on shifting business currents as the world shifts to cleaner energy sources and fuels.

Fifty U.S. and European institutional investors managing $1.75 trillion in assets agreed to invest $10 billion more in energy efficiency and "clean energy" technologies over the next two years and to aim for a 20 percent reduction in energy from core real estate investment holdings over three years. California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer said his state's leading pension funds would invest more than $800 million in environmental technology with similar aims.

A report by the McKinsey Global Institute released at the U.N. conference said major investments over the next decade in boosting the output from various types of energy that consumers use could earn investors double-digit rates of return.

"As soon as people believe carbon has a price, it's going to have a price," said Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems.

One of those ideas that I like to imagine will turn into reality in future is what I once dubbed "Silicon Valley's War On Big Oil" - the technology industry realising that global warming and peak oil make the fossil fuelled energy industry a dinosaur ripe to be eaten by nimbler competitors, and setting to it with gusto.

Wired reports that Al Gore and John Doerr are becoming partners in each other's venture capital firms and are looking for opportunities in the clean energy sector.

Gore, Doerr & Joy is not a folk rock supergroup but an investment power trio with a common goal: To use market forces to stop global warming.

Former vice president Al Gore has become a partner in Silicon Valley's top venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers. In return, John Doerr -- KPCB founder and early investor in Amazon, Google and Netscape -- has joined the advisory board of Gore's three-year-old green investment firm, Generation. And Bill Joy, the boy genius behind Sun Microsystems, Java and the latest generation of Unix operating systems, is a KPCB partner who established his cred as a techno activist by advocating limits on research in potentially dangerous technologies like genetic engineering.

Together, they're inviting all comers to submit eco-friendly business plans in need of capital.

The climate situation is so dire, and the investment opportunity so enticing, that the principals are determined to leave no possible solution unexplored. Doerr, who confessed his fear of climate change in an emotional presentation at last year's TED (technology, entertainment, design) conference, predicts that $200 million in KPCB capital will target global warming within a year, in addition to the $270 million currently allocated to environmental issues.

The alliance with Generation will help him figure out where to put the new money. The alt-fuels market is estimated to be worth $1 trillion, the global energy industry worth six times as much. All of which makes the new Green Revolution the new internet on Sand Hill Road. "It's going to be fun and wildly profitable, and really good for the planet. How can you not be excited about this?" says Joy. ...

Al Gore: If I could start up with a brief opening comment. We are announcing an international alliance between Generation Investment Management and Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. These two firms, in alliance, cover the full spectrum of the investment marketplace, and we’re asking entrepreneurs, innovators, investors and technologists around the world to send us their ideas, business plans and new technologies.

We have geared up to give a full and fair hearing to those ideas. Though we will, no doubt, make mistakes, we will pledge our best efforts to give a full hearing -- including to ideas and technologies that perhaps have been given short shrift in the past -- and we look forward to seeing many that have not yet seen the light of day.

We believe that Sir Nicholas Stern is right when he says, along with others, that there is an investment gap of up to 1 percent of world GDP over the next several decades that needs to be closed if we’re going to succeed in quickly developing a low-carbon economy. We’re very excited to have this chance to work together and bring these two world-class teams together.

Bill Joy: It’s widely recognized that we’re going to need to invest more, but we also need to buy things we can afford.

If we look at the technologies out there today, there’s a lot of things that can be profitably deployed. People can get a lot more efficient. But the scale of the problem is very large. We’re going to need new technologies to fully solve the problem.

Investing in new technologies and more rapid deployment of technologies that are farther along and sharing intelligence about the best way to allocate capital will yield not only good investment returns but also better results for the planet. That’s why we’re so excited to be working with Generation and Al Gore.

Wired News: So you’re inviting all comers to pitch you?

Gore: The tone of your voice conveys some question about the wisdom of this invitation.

WN: It does make me wonder how you’ll cope with the inevitable flood of –- how can I say it politely? Un-actionable ideas.

Gore: Between Generation and Kleiner Perkins, we’re already seeing 3,000 plans per year. So we have already developed the capacity for this review and we have scaled it up in anticipation of increased flow. And, of course, we recognize that there are a lot of proposals that should never see the light of day. But we also recognize that there are a lot of great ideas and technologies that have not been given adequate consideration and aren’t (given adequate consideration) because of the heavy subsidies for high-carbon technologies that are enormously profitable for incumbent enterprises. As the world shifts away from a high-carbon economy, we need to do a better job, all of us, in recognizing the new opportunities.

David Blood: The challenge that Bill Joy just outlined is an enormous challenge. We’re in the process of moving from the carbon-based economy to something different. It would be probable that that would undergo a change over the course of decades.

Our guess is -- given the challenges associated with climate change -- which transition is going to need to occur much more quickly. Over a 10-year period, possibly a five-year period.

So the need for entrepreneurship and creativity in ways we can’t even fathom, not only as investors or business people but across civil society, is so great that, in some ways, the call seems to be, we’re asking for a lot.

But it’s also symbolic, to say we need to take a different approach here. We need to have a total change of mindset. We need creativity. We need existing businesses to change -- entrepreneurs, capital markets professionals and public policy. ...