San Francisco (CA) - Former Vice President Al Gore believes that your Facebook account should not be used to just share photos with friends or update your status. Instead he sees a much deeper purpose. And that purpose would relate - yes, you guessed it - to the environment.
“The purpose, I would urge all of you - as many of you as are willing to take it up - is to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth,” said Gore On Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco late Friday.
Promoting the fight against global warming, Gore did not describe how social networking could make a contribution in detail, but he received two standing ovations for his moving speech.
Gore discussed what he felt were the shortcomings in his work as an advocate. “Because even though there’s a greater sense of awareness, there is not anything anywhere close to an appropriate sense of urgency. This is an existential threat.” Al Gore made a public plea to President-elect Barak Obama to set a nation wide goal of making our nations electricity run 100% off of renewable and non-carbon sources within the next ten years.
Obama stated that he would devote $150 billion over the next ten years to clean energy. Gore feels that this number isn’t high enough and outlined the need for the U.S. to run off of a unified national smart grid that has high-voltage, low loss underground wires capable of delivering renewable energy from production locations - such as the deserts in Arizona or plains in Dakota. Gore estimates that this grid would cost the U.S. about $400 billion, but it would pay off in only three years.
Currently, the nation is spending $120 billion on outages that are caused by an aging energy grid.
The United States should also insulate homes, utilize new lighting and bulbs, and install new windows in homes, Gore said. He noted that more than 40% of the carbon dioxide that is released into our atmosphere is expelled by buildings. Changes such as these would reduce expenses to homeowners and also aid in the creation of new jobs, Gore said.
He returned to the Internet by referring to the “cloud”, where information is stored and from where it should aid in spreading information about the state of our environment and the importance of the involvement of individuals and groups. “We have to have the truth — the inconvenient truth, forgive me — stored in the cloud so that people don’t have to rely on that process, and so we can respond to it collectively,” Gore said.
“The purpose, I would urge all of you - as many of you as are willing to take it up - is to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger and opportunity we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the Earth,” said Gore On Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco late Friday.
Promoting the fight against global warming, Gore did not describe how social networking could make a contribution in detail, but he received two standing ovations for his moving speech.
Gore discussed what he felt were the shortcomings in his work as an advocate. “Because even though there’s a greater sense of awareness, there is not anything anywhere close to an appropriate sense of urgency. This is an existential threat.” Al Gore made a public plea to President-elect Barak Obama to set a nation wide goal of making our nations electricity run 100% off of renewable and non-carbon sources within the next ten years.
Obama stated that he would devote $150 billion over the next ten years to clean energy. Gore feels that this number isn’t high enough and outlined the need for the U.S. to run off of a unified national smart grid that has high-voltage, low loss underground wires capable of delivering renewable energy from production locations - such as the deserts in Arizona or plains in Dakota. Gore estimates that this grid would cost the U.S. about $400 billion, but it would pay off in only three years.
Currently, the nation is spending $120 billion on outages that are caused by an aging energy grid.
The United States should also insulate homes, utilize new lighting and bulbs, and install new windows in homes, Gore said. He noted that more than 40% of the carbon dioxide that is released into our atmosphere is expelled by buildings. Changes such as these would reduce expenses to homeowners and also aid in the creation of new jobs, Gore said.
He returned to the Internet by referring to the “cloud”, where information is stored and from where it should aid in spreading information about the state of our environment and the importance of the involvement of individuals and groups. “We have to have the truth — the inconvenient truth, forgive me — stored in the cloud so that people don’t have to rely on that process, and so we can respond to it collectively,” Gore said.