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If youre Al Gore, former Democratic vice-president and climate change activist, you blast Big Power for using the atmosphere as their sewage infrastructure to suck up carbon emissions and trying to shut down competition. The industry is waging a war on solar, he told investors Monday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York City.

If youre Debbie Dooley, a national Tea Party activist who says state laws discriminate against residential solar, you tell the same audience that Americans want energy freedom and not government-sanctioned monopolies that tell consumers where they must buy power.

In back-to-back speeches, the political Odd Couple struck surprisingly similar tones on clean energys future, even if Gore dwelled on renewables role in avoiding catastrophic global warming while Dooley didnt use the words climate change at all, focusing on consumer choice.

This is a battle that we will win, said Dooley, a board member of the National Tea Party Patriots group. I am literally floored with the response I have been getting from conservatives with the right message.

Struggle

Only minutes earlier, Gore told the audience that we are going to win this struggle and the business community is leading the way. He cited investments in wind, solar and battery technology as transformational to the energy business in the U.S.

The fact these two forces from opposite ends of the spectrum are coming together reflects a maturing in the environmental debate, with a search on for leaders who can deliver the message to different communities, said Andy Hoffman, director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan.

The issue of climate change has to be framed in a way that its salient to people, and it has to come from people they trust, Hoffman said at the conference. The Green Tea Party is framing it around freedom. The whole challenge is how we make it something that resonates with people.

Consensus Forming?

If theres a consensus forming, its still hard to tell in Washington, where the new Republican majority in Congress has vowed to block President Barack Obamas environmental agenda. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from coal- rich Kentucky, has urged states to refuse to implement proposed rules on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. McConnell called Obamas proposal job-killing and likely illegal, according to a statement March 31.

Read more here:
Al Gore Teams Up with Tea Party to Fight Solar-Hating Utilities