Designers of embedded systems will play a key role in solving the climate crisis, former vice president Al Gore said last week. His keynote speech at the Embedded Systems Conference earned a standing ovation. It turns out he's an entertaining speaker who uses self-deprecating humor--as when he mentioned that he used to fly on Air Force 2 but now has to take his shoes off in the security line for a commercial flight. More important, though, he spoke directly to engineers and specifically addressed embedded systems. And he noted the demographic challenges facing engineering, including outsourcing and the reduced interest in the profession among young people in the United States.

I won't review the arguments Gore raised for the immediacy of global warming; you've heard them all if you've seen his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. More relevant are his suggestions for what engineers can do about it. "Embedded systems can be the most powerful part of a solution to this crisis," Gore said. "Our old, legacy systems are ridiculously inefficient."

It's not just a question of power conservation, Gore said; better engineering can both reduce CO2 emissions and make money. "Pollution is waste. You have to buy raw materials to create pollution. If you can reengineer products to create less pollution, you're ahead of the game."

Why not "unleash the IT revolution," Gore said, and create a power grid where small "microgenerating" sources, including homes and businesses, can generate clean power and sell it into the grid? With efficient photovoltaic cells and better windmills, maybe we won't need centralized power generation plants that spew CO2.

Solving problems like the climate crisis will provide opportunities that will bring young people into science and engineering, Gore said. "We can watch outsourcing take our jobs away, or we can 'insource' innovation and creativity."

Gore is not an engineer, and he didn't offer many specifics. But power consumption has become critical in IC and system design. Servers and compute farms are among the biggest users of electricity. Responses to that challenge include multi- core design, low-power IC design methodologies and the use of FPGAs to accelerate algorithms.

Surprisingly, I didn't hear much talk about low-power design at ESC. Software development has a role to play in power minimization, but the software and real-time OS vendors weren't talking about it.

I hope they begin to address this issue with the kind of "innovation and creativity" that Gore so eloquently called for.