Al Gore and his REPOWER Campaign people have come out with another video.

Studies show that the resource potential of solar energy is so vast that a parcel of land in the Southwest, 96 miles on a side, could power Americas entire electricity system.

Join the campaign and help make it happen.

Before a joint session of Congress last week, President Obama expressed strong support for growing our
economy by repowering America, calling for American leadership and innovation in clean energy technologies
and for a national energy policy that shifts emphasis away from the dirty fuels of the 20th century.

We invented solar technology, but weve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it,
President Obama said. It is time for America to lead again.

Call on your elected officials to lead again, join the Repower America campaign.(via)

I was having a conversation with a coworker yesterday about how silly modern society is about the use of oil, coal and natural gas.

If you think about it, gas, oil and coal are are millions of years of stored solar energy (plants grow, plants die, plants get buried, millions of years, wallah! oil). Nothing else on the planet rivals it in energy density, or portability, or usefulness. And what do we do with this amazing, precious, and highly limited substance. How do we treat this marvel of nature? We burn it in our cars so we can get our fat asses to and from work. We make plastic bottles out of it and then throw them in the ocean. We use one of the most potent, but limited, energy sources on our planet, to keep the lights on at night. Consider this waste against the fact that there is enough wind solar and geothermal energy on this planet to handle everything we need (and it will never run out).

Our coal oil and gas deposits should be saved for a time when there is a real emergency. It has taken the planet millions of years to store up these energy reserves and we are wasting them at such a rapid clip that they might soon be gone. It would be comforting to know that we have a large amount of stored energy safely below ground in the event that we really need it (asteroid is coming got to get off the planet, aliens invade need to build death laser, giant earth quake floods mid-west need to build giant pump, you know important things).

Not to mention, that burning this energy is causing our planet to become inhospitable to human life, funds terrorist loving oppressive regimes, promotes inequity between the rich and poor, is turning our oceans acidic, melting our ice caps, destroying our mountains, and has been the cause of more than a few wars…I could go on.

In short fossil fuels are too precious to be wasted on mundane business like transportation and powering our homes. That is the job for renewable energy. Fossil fuels should be used (and used carefully) for the VERY FEW applications that require high amounts of energy density in a low weight package.

The plains Indians used to rely on buffalo for almost every part of their lives. They ate them, used the skins to make shelter, made items from the bones, they used almost every part of the animal. They understood the importance of this one species to their lives. They worshiped the buffalo and treated them with the utmost in respect and reverence.

We currently use oil for almost every part of our lives, from the food we eat (fertilizers), to the cloths we wear (synthetic fabrics), to the homes we live in, the cars we drive, the roads we drive them on, almost every made object in our world, our communications systems, our medical field, not a thing in our life is untouched by the influence of oil/gas/coal. However we have no complicated religious rituals around oil, we don’t think about oil (unless it is the price of gas), we don’t revere oil, we don’t respect oil, we don’t care at all.

What does that tell you about how detached we are from the important things in our world? I say it’s time we start treating fossil fuels with the respect they deserve, and the first step in that is leaving them in the ground where they belong. Safely waiting for a time when we might really be in a jam.

To paraphrase a great poet, Save some oil, build a solar farm.