WASHINGTON — With global warming taking center stage in world affairs, Al Gore can't be far behind: The Nobel-Prize-winning former-vice president-turned-energy entrepreneur is releasing his plan to crack the climate conundrum.

"The clock is ticking with respect to solving the crisis," Gore, 59, said Thursday as he sat in pinstripes and black cowboy boots in an environmentally certified conference room, with glass walls and white surfaces. Our Choice, A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, which debuted Tuesday, "offers us the tools to find a way out."


In 416 pages, Gore offers a potpourri of lavishly illustrated recipes — solar, geothermal, and wind power solutions — for slowing the greenhouse gases warming the climate. "It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve three or four climate crises," Gore writes. "The only missing ingredient is collective will."

Essentially, Gore proposes moving ahead with such technologies on a broad front while securing an international agreement that puts a price on the carbon dioxide wafting from smokestacks, and limits the deforestation that adds to greenhouse gases. (The Senate's environment committee, led by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-Calif, forwarded just such a "cap-and-trade" bill Thursday, for a vote, despite a boycott by committee Republicans.)