Despite the economical problems that the newly voted president, Barack Obama, has to face, former presidential candidate Al Gore warned him that the main priority is to adopt a long-term plan to tackle climate change. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Gore said that it’s important to obtain 100% of America’s electricity from renewable and non-carbon sources within 10 years. Furthermore, Al Gore thought that this challenge is just like the one president John Fitzgerald Kennedy set in the 1960s: reaching the moon.

One of the ideas Gore had was to construct a “national unified smart grid”, which will cost $400 billion but it will also pay for itself in three-and-a-half years in terms of the annual cost to American business of $120 billion from outages and other problems. The grid would consist of high-voltage low-loss underground lines feeding electricity from geothermal hotspots, solar power in the south western deserts and wind power in the mountain corridor from Texas to the Dakotas. In addition, Gore thinks that American people should conserve electricity. The former U.S. vice-president picked this specific summit because he has seen how much the Internet helped Obama win the election. The Internet is the most appropriate place to promote your ideas and hundreds of millions of people visit it daily. Al Gore was impressed by how Obama innovatively used the Web during his campaign.

Gore has become a leading voice in the past few years for the protection of the environment. The audience from San Francisco supported his ideas with cheers and heavy applause. To end his speech, he tried to spook the audience telling them that there’s a big chance that in the next 5 years, the North Pole ice cap, which is almost the size of the continental U.S., will disappear: “This is an apocalyptic signal from the planet itself.”