Al Gore admits it won't be easy.

His critics are loud. And painful as it is, he has to contemplate that we might not "find the moral courage" to solve global warming, which he calls the foremost planetary crisis before us.

But because he's optimistic, he's giving us a road map for how to address it. Due in bookstores today, it's called Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

Gore wants to retrofit not just our buildings and our political policies, but also our very culture, changing the way we avoid thinking about climate change because it seems too abstract.

Rather than a checklist, it's an all-of-the-above primer on everything from renewable energy to forest conservation to building a smarter grid. Not to mention the need to develop the political will.

"We need changes in laws and policies in order to accelerate reduction in global-warming pollution," he said in a recent interview with The Inquirer.

On Friday, Gore will be at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, speaking at a national conference on critical security issues in the 21st century sponsored by the World Affairs Council.

His critics have long called some of his ideas impractical and said they would hurt the economy.

Gore takes his critics on, even picturing some of them in the book and attributing their views to "political bias."

The 416-page paperback from Rodale Books, of Emmaus, Pa., is a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

It resembles a cross between a textbook and a coffee-table book, a Ken-Burns-meets-global-warming, with vivid diagrams of how technologies work and lavish color photos. It lists at $26.99.

Gore cites environmental exhortations from the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah and lambastes corporate carbon polluters for "lavishly financed" campaigns of "intentional deception" that he says have "poisoned" the integrity of the nation's democracy.

The book comes just a month before the world's leaders meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to establish a climate agreement.

Gore, who recently met unofficially with climate-policy leaders in China, South Africa, and Egypt, plans to be in Copenhagen for the talks, an aide said. Gore is registered through his nonprofit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which gives him "observer" status. (The proceeds from his book are being donated to the organization.)

"The airwaves will be jammed leading up to Copenhagen, and he'll have the biggest microphone," said Timothy E. Wirth, president of the nonprofit United Nations Foundation and a former Democratic senator from Colorado.

From China to Europe, climate change "is all people talk about," Wirth said. "Here, it's like people whistling past the graveyard."

Andrew Light, an analyst with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, also believes Gore will be a major presence in Copenhagen.

Two years ago, Gore all but single-handedly saved climate talks in Indonesia from collapsing when he flew to Bali and persuaded some delegates not to walk out of the meeting in protest over the position the Bush administration was taking, Light said.

Even some who disagree with Gore's recommendations respect his voice.

"The bottom line is, Al Gore is a large and present voice in this debate, and he will continue to be that," said Frank Maisano, energy specialist at Bracewell & Giuliani L.L.P., an international law firm that represents utilities, refiners, and wind developers.