Gore urges Obama to deliver 100 per cent renewables within a decade

As speculation mounts that he could be offered the post of climate change czar in the Obama administration, former vice president Al Gore has called on the president-elect to go way beyond his election pledges and set a target of switching the US to 100 per cent renewable energy within 10 years.

The president-elect has outlined plans to ensure energy suppliers get a quarter of their energy from renewable sources by 2025, but speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco late last week, Gore urged Obama to implement a far more ambitious climate change bill.

"I think the president-elect should announce in January…a national goal of getting 100 per cent of America's electricity from renewable and non-carbon sources within 10 years," he said, comparing the goal to President Kennedy's Apollo Project goal of putting a man on the moon.

"In Houston, in the control room [for the moon landing], the system engineers had an average age of 26, which means when President Kennedy issued this challenge they had an average age of 18," he said. "These young people that have been so inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign…want a purpose."

Obama has pledged to invest $150bn (£95bn) over 10 years in clean technology and Gore mapped out a vision for how much of that money should be invested, highlighting energy efficiency and an overhaul of the US electricity grid as the most cost-effective means of cutting carbon emissions.

He urged the president-elect to instigate an "immediate national retrofit programme" to insulate the housing stock, creating millions of jobs in the process, and also called for a $400bn national smart grid programme that would replace the current grid with high-voltage direct current cables capable of transmitting energy the large distances from solar power farms in the southern deserts and the wind power corridor of the Midwest to major population centres.

Gore also claimed that the internet should play a crucial role in tackling climate change, urging the technology industry to reclaim the web as a philanthropic arena.

He said that like the early uses of electricity the web was still being used widely for "specialised applications and gimmicks", when its true long-term purpose could be "to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger...we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the earth".