Former US vice president Al Gore said an Internet revolution carrying Barack Obama to the White House should now focus its power on stopping Earth’s climate crisis.
The one-time presidential contender turned environmental champion said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday that technology has provided tools to save the planet while creating jobs and stimulating the crippled economy.
“The young people who have been inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign and the movement that powered Barack Obama’s campaign want a purpose,” Gore said.
“One of the reasons we were all thrilled Tuesday night is it was pretty obvious this was a collectively intelligent decision,” he said.
The Internet’s critical role in Obama’s victory in the presidential race was a “great blow for victory” in addressing a “democracy crisis” stifling action against climate change, Gore said.
The Web has “revolutionized” nearly every aspect of running for US president and delivered an “electrifying redemption” of the founding national principle that all people are created equal, Gore said.
“Some week,” Gore said in greeting to an audience that leapt to its feet cheering. “It really was overwhelming. It couldn’t have happened without the Internet.”
Gore has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to combat climate change and starred in an Academy Award-winning global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
He also founded Current TV, a cable television operation that taps into user-generated videos and news coverage fed to its Web site.
Current TV teamed with Twitter and Digg on election night to weave feeds from the popular Internet Web sites into its coverage of the vote.
The Web has the potential to “revolutionize almost every aspect” of running for US president, Gore said. He believes that social activism made possible by people connecting and sharing information online is in its infancy.
“What happened in the election opens a full new range of possibilities and now is the time to really move swiftly to exploit these new possibilities,” Gore said of turning the power of the Internet to cooling global warming.
He said Obama should announce a national goal of getting all US electric power from renewable and non-carbon energy within the next decade and spend the billions necessary to build an “electrinet” smart power grid.
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