his cabinet and has him as the point man on alternative energy. I think that would be a sound choice.

If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.

Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.

Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem.

This moment — $4.11 — represents Bush’s last chance for a legacy. It amazes me how inadequate his response has been. By hectoring the nation to simply drill for more oil, he has profoundly underestimated the challenges we face, misread the scale of the solutions required, underappreciated the American people’s willingness to sacrifice if presented with a real plan, and ignored the greatness that would accrue to our country if we led the world in clean power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/op...html?th&emc=th