"Now, in the midst of this frenetic effort to find a bailout, many are saying we should have prevented this. We should have realized that the short-term greed was overcoming a clear vision of what the risk was," said Gore.

"Well, now is the time to prevent a much worse catastrophe because the world has several trillion dollars in sub-prime carbon assets, based on the assumption that it is perfectly alright to put 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours. Since we met here last year, the world has lost ground to the climate crisis.

“This is a rout," he warned. "We are losing badly. The strength of the storms, the depth of the drought, the movement of tropical diseases into areas that never experienced them before, this is the result of a dysfunctional, insane global system pattern that we have to change," Gore said.

"We should stop burning coal [applause] without sequestering the CO2," he insisted. "The coal and oil companies have spent, in the United States alone, a half a billion dollars in the first eight months of this year promoting a lie that there is such a thing as clean coal. Clean coal is like healthy cigarettes [laughter]. It does not exist. It could theoretically exist. The only demonstration plant was cancelled. How many such plants are there? Zero. How many blueprints? Zero."

Instead of bailing out Wall Street to increase consumption and carbon burning, Gore urged investing in “switching our energy infrastructure from one that depends on fuel that is dirty, dangerous, destroying the habitability of this planet and rising in price to a new global energy infrastructure that is based on fuel that is free forever: the sun [applause] and the wind and geothermal."

There technology is available, he added. Europe is going gangbusters with carbon free energy.

Instead of working to bring about sanely sustainable solutions, Gore lambasted the "utter insanity" of U.S. Congress. While attention remains fixated on giveaways to the robber barons that have crippled the country, Congress - “without debate and without a single hearing [are] preparing to lift the moratorium on the development of oil shale, which would vastly multiply the amount of CO2 from every gallon of gasoline,” Gore warned. “This is utter insanity and it demonstrates that the wealth and power and influence of the entrenched carbon lobby to twist policy and to put out illusory impressions about this that is overwhelming free debate."

Tell it!

The oil shale of the Green River geological formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming contains as much as 1.8 trillion barrels of dirty oil shale - roughly three times the size of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves and enough to finish off good old planet Earth if some 40 trillion pounds of carbon and sulphur into the wheezing atmos-fear.

Canada is the current world leader in demonstrating how dirty and costly recovering oil from shale can be. But once disturbed by gigantic Earth-ripping machines, the Green River deposits could rapidly pollute the entire Colorado water basin.

The U.S. Council of Mayors is so concerned about the dire harm from oil shale production, they've passed a resolution against purchasing petroleum products produced from this astonishingly dirty oil.