Former US Vice President Al Gore said Thursday survival of the country is at risk and he called for using carbon-free and renewable sources only in electricity production by 2018.

Speaking at Washington's Constitution Hall, Gore said the economic, environmental and national security crises facing the nation are all related.

"I don't remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously," he said.

To begin to fix all the problems, Gore said "the answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels."

Gore called on the country to produce all of its electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources in 10 years, a goal he compared to late former President John Kennedy's challenge for thecountry to put a man on the moon in the 1960s.

He opposed opening new areas for oil drilling as a solution to US energy problems.

"It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil 10 years from now," Gore said.

After losing the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, the former vice president returned to the nation's political main stage with "An Inconvenient Truth", a documentary film detailing global warming's effects on the planet, in 2006.

The widely acclaimed film went on to win an Academy Award for best documentary in 2007.

Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize that year for increasing awareness of the climate change issue and for advocating for policies that could potentially offset the effects of global warming.

(Xinhua News Agency July 18, 2008)