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. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.

Al Gore, July 17, 2008

The whole speech is reprinted below. It's worth a read. It's a huge relief from the drill, drill, drill campaign that's been touted over the last month as the answer to America's energy problem. Repeat something often enough, and people start to believe it. Now we've got another campaign to contend with, courtesy of Al Gore: the Clean Tech Moonshot.

And it's based on convincing grand unified theory of what is ailing the nation and the globe:

....our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of .... the economic, environmental and national security crises. We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

And so Gore has issued a call, ending his speech by speaking of the moonshot:

On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon....

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.

The call for a Clean Tech Moonshot is nothing new. It has been an idea in the solutions space for a long time, echoed far and wide, in the clean energy section of this web site, too.

Once upon a time, the Soviet Union was threatening to be the first country to put a man on the moon. The president galvanized the nation to meet the challenge, and Americans got there first. The end.

The story of clean energy could follow a similar script. Global warming is a far larger and realer threat than a Soviet lunar landing ever was, but a similar sense of national mission is missing, even though developing reliable and abundant sources of clean energy is the next lunar landing, the next great leap for both America and humankind.

This and other echoes of the moonshot frame couldn't even get Congress to hand over a crumb off the federal table -- extension of the production tax credit for renewable energy. But Gore has attached an ambitious target and the full weight of his influence in order to make this moonshot suddenly real.

In his speech, he's got answers for "those who say 10 years is not enough time" and "for those who say the challenge is not politically viable." The nitpickers and the naysayers will have a field day no matter what.

So its probably worth it for every person who plans to form an opinion -- or mouth one -- to read Gore's words in the original in its entirety. If you want to watch it, head on over to youtube. But this speech is worth the active exercise of brain function and engagement of the individual human heart, and it takes 1/5th the time to read it than to watch it.

While you’re reading about the US economy’s tumble into recession, think about this: The US coal industry -- which powers half of America and is currently riding a sizable export boom -- has been hemorrhaging home-grown jobs for decades.

From a new report by the Worldwatch Institute:

In the United States, coal output rose by almost one third during the past two decades, yet employment has been cut in half.

The US coal industry employs about 80,000 individuals -- and dropping.

Meanwhile, renewable energy, which provides just six percent of US electricity needs, employed 200,000 people directly in ’06, and another 246,000 indirectly. And that's just a sliver of the sector’s potential.

Take a look at offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and you'll see a curious sight: wind turbines on the platforms, hundreds of them. The one in the picture is on a Chevron rig.

Chevron and other oil companies are using the power from the micro-generating turbines to run the nerve center of oil rig operations - called SCADA in industry jargon. Oil rig SCADA systems used to run off of inefficient thermal electric generators, which burned oil and then converted the heat to electricity. No more.

Want to start a farm at a high school and become a groundwork coordinator? There may be a job waiting for you in Massachusetts. Look at this notice that ended up in my "in" box today, Earth Day:

Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall School, an independent high school located in Waltham, MA, seeks a Groundwork Coordinator. The vision of Groundwork is to create a farm to serve as an experiential education facility for the school.....It is the responsibility of this individual to design and oversee the creation of the farm and crop plans and assist in the integration of the Groundwork program into the curriculum.

Sounds like a great job, and lots more of those jobs are going to be available in the future, for sure.

But surf on over to a web site called Coal Miners for Hire and the job hunting turns awfully grim.

It's a coincidence that this Tuesday both the registered Democrats of Pennsylvania and CitiGroup's shareholders will be casting their votes. In Pennsylvania, it's a choice between Obama and Clinton, and at Citi there's a proxy statement full of issues -- but in both cases the troubling face of climate and coal is on view.

With 47,000 coal workers in Pennsylvania and West Virginia -- critical states for both nomination and election -- Obama and Clinton have been campaigning along a tight rope suspended between the opposite poles of a glaring contradiction: promising strong climate action and a bright future for coal.

Citi's shareholders face a choice laden with a similar contradiction. They have a stake in a bank that has promised vigorous action on climate change, yet financing coal is an important source of profits. In fact, Citi is one of the leading financiers of mountaintop removal mining (MTR).

Now shareholder proposal #9 (on page 86 of the 2008 Proxy Statement available here) is asking shareholders to tell the bank to stop dirtying its hands with profits from coal: