Crud, I've been so wrapped up in work this week that I forgot about getting tickets to Gore's speech today in DC:

The Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan group that he chairs, estimates the cost of transforming the nation to so-called clean electricity sources at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion over 30 years in public and private money.

He's undoubtedly right. Why dump a ton of money into "clean coal" when we could instead invest it into something that's renewable, from the wind, sun and other earth-friendly energy sources.

But here's the dilemma, the backers of coal are a strong lobbying group, they count Dems such as Barack Obama and Brian Schweitzer among their proponents. Likewise, the backers of drilling for off-shore oil are a strong lobbying group, and have plenty of Democrats advocating for it, as does the expansion of nuclear. And those three things are pretty much all of what Republicans want, while many Democrats want nothing of it anymore asap.

Take a look at the Newt Gingrich "American Solutions" page for 'drill here, drill now, pay less' and you'll see 1,350,831 people have signed the petition. And look over at Al Gore's "We Can Solve It" page and 1,377,689 people have signed the petition to "support repowering America" through clean energy.

Pretty evenly divided. My guess is that not a single thing is going to happen until there's a compromise made. We can either continue to go as is, to hell in a handbasket, or a solution will be brokered that does the dirty fuels that we are addicted to right now, and invests into the clean fuels for the future. I'd love for the nation to roll with Gore's plan, but its not going to happen with carbon-based advocates blocking the way.

The pathetic thing is that George Bush will have dumped nearly $1 Trillion dollars into the desert of the Mideast war before we get him out of the office of the presidency. With that kind of money, imagine if we'd have had a president that took 9/11 as a mission to have gotten off of the addition to the middle east's oil instead.

But he said it would cost about as much to build coal plants to satisfy current demand. "This is an investment that will pay itself back many times over," Gore said. "It's an expensive investment but not compared to the rising cost of continuing to invest in fossil fuels."