Al Gore Has a Vision for the United States. (July 20, 2008)

"I’m going to issue a strategic challenge that the United States of America set a goal of getting 100 percent of our electricity from renewable resources and carbon-constrained fuels within 10 years," the Goracle told New York Times columnist Bob Herbert last week, prefacing a speech he was to give in a day or two.

An incredulous Bob Herbert: "One hundred percent?" to which the former Vice-President and Nobel Laureate repeated, "100%".

It's solar, wind and geothermal energy on which Mr Gore has his sights set, and he went on to say: "We need to make a big, massive, one-off investment to transform our energy infrastructure from one that relies on a dirty, expensive fuel to fuel that is free. The sun and the wind and geothermal are not going to run out, and we don’t have to export them from the Persian Gulf, and they are not increasing in price. And since the only factor that controls the price is the efficiency and innovation that goes into the equipment that transforms it into electricity, once you start getting the scales that we’re anticipating, those systems come down in cost."

You can just see Mr Herbert shrugging his shoulders as he writes: "The correct response to Mr. Gore’s proposal would be a rush to figure out ways to make it happen... Don’t hold your breath."

In his address Mr Gore told his audience: "We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?"

But as the New York Times columnist sees it: "Americans are extremely anxious at the moment, and I think part of it has to do with a deeply unsettling feeling that the nation may not be up to the tremendous challenges it is facing. A recent poll by the Rockefeller Foundation and Time magazine that focused on economic issues found a deep pessimism running through respondents. According to Margot Brandenburg, an official with the foundation, nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds 'feel that America's best days are in the past.'"

With all of this another NYT columnist, Frank Rich, tells us: "Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina [former HP CEO] — Mr. McCain is [economically] clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain's latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration."

Who knows, the Goracle and the Governator might make quite a team.