Gore's Challenge

By: JOURNAL EDITORIAL STAFF | Winston-Salem Journal
Published: July 23, 2008

Former Vice President Al Gore has challenged the United States to convert our current production of electricity from fossil fuels to renewables.

Gore says that we can do so within a decade, and a number of renewable-energy enthusiasts and entrepreneurs agree. Politicians and businessmen tied to traditional energy sources and production scoff.

Whether Gore is right or the traditionalists are right, it really doesn't matter. What matters is that the United States take on Gore's challenge, that we shoot for this kind of energy independence over the next 10 years.

If we make it, we'll have accomplished the energy and environmental equivalent of landing on the moon. If we fall short by 10 or 20 or even 50 percent, we will have still accomplished an incredible undertaking, and we'll be better off for it.

In just recent months, there have been new breakthroughs in wind and solar-power generation. Energy production levels from renewables that had at one time seemed far in our future are now reachable or on the near horizon. As these technologies go into use, the per-unit cost of each solar panel or windmill will drop considerably. Don't forget, the first home computers cost thousands of dollars 30 years ago. Now, much faster and more dependable computers cost only a fraction of those prices.

There are some who will dismiss anything Al Gore says because he is a Democrat or because they still think -- mistakenly -- that he claimed to have invented the Internet and discovered Love Canal. (He claimed neither.) Others pick nits with his Oscar-winning documentary on the environment.

So, for those people, there's another voice to hear. It's that of T. Boone Pickens, the famed oilman and hedge-fund operator who happens to be a Republican. He's urging the nation to shift its share of electricity generated by natural gas to wind. We should then convert our automobiles from gasoline to natural gas and tell the world's oil producers to keep it, he says.

Still not convinced? Then there's Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who also advocates dramatic ventures into renewable-energy production and who complimented Gore when he released his plan.

While the Pickens plan might vary greatly from the Gore plan, it is headed in the same direction: away from fossil-based fuels that destroy our environment and put the United States in an untenable economic situation. Instead, both men propose to produce our energy from a source that will not harm the environment, nor underwrite the economies of our political competitors, but which will provide a huge boon to our own economy.

Much is made of the trillions it will cost to finance Gore's plan. This overlooks the absolute certainty that our current course will cost us trillions.

But if we head in the direction toward which Gore and Pickens point, we arrive on the other end financially, politically and environmentally sounder.