Al Gore would make a rotten camp activities director. His idea of motivating the youth of America is to urge them to get arrested in front of a coal plant.

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore said Wednesday at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York.

To translate that last bit from the original green-ese, Gore is referring to coal-driven power plants without the cutting-edge technology to capture the emissions that would otherwise pour through smokestacks. All that carbon-dioxide could instead be liquified and pumped underground -- in theory, at least. In reality, when Gore says young people should protest plants that don't have carbon capture, he means all new coal plants, because this is a technology that is at least a decade away from practical use.

Generation Y (or have we skipped to Generation Z by now?) is for the most part more concerned with getting their hands on the newest electronic gadgets or getting into the top colleges than with current events, so Gore's call isn't all that likely to be heeded. That's not to say it shouldn't be, because the Miley Cyrus crowd will be paying a monstrous price for global warming long after Al Gore is nothing but atmospheric carbon.

What's particulary worrisome are the huge sums the coal interests are pouring into lobbying and marketing efforts, like the Orwellian "Clean Coal" ad campaign from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. This is a trade group of energy producers whose very name is an oxymoron: "Clean coal" is sort of like "safe nuclear fallout." Coal is an astonishingly filthy fossil fuel responsible for the bulk of the global warming problem, not to mention mercury contamination and deadly air pollution. All that coal-industry lobbying money is paying off. The Senate on Tuesday passed an energy bill that promotes automotive fuels made from liquid coal, which burns about twice as dirty as gasoline. If prices for electricity ever rise as sharply as they have for oil, we can expect even worse legislation from Congress.

Man the barricades, boys and girls.

* Photo by Menahem Kahana / AFP/Getty Images