New REPOWER Campaign Video

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 cothe legend of jack o lantern and jack o lantern halloween costumeuntries 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 ireland birthplace of halloweenso 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 get your baby dressed up for the coming halloweenfossil 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.

Chevron: Will You Join Us? Don’t Be Stupid!

<travel around mexico on halloween and join the paradep>

(from The Unsuitablog)

Oil companies want you to use their products, and despite what they may appear to say, they really want you to use oil. I will repeat this: oil companies want you to use oil. That seems obvious, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise - I really would forgive you.

In fact, it would be fair to say that, given the raison d’etre of any oil company is to make money from selling oil, they will consider anything that does not allow them to make a profit from selling oil as commercial suicide. Nevertheless - and this is why I would forgive you - they are doing an incredible job convincing us that they are actually benign, even beneficial, entities. The public at large are very much aware that oil companies trade in death; not only through their greenhouse gas emitting activities, but through their politically smokescreened desire to expand their global reach, whatever the environmental or social cost.

They are prepared to start wars to get oil.

They are prepared to destroy ecosystems to get oil.

They are prepared to displace humans to get oil.

They are prepared to do anything it takes to ensure that they profit from the business of extracting, refining, distributing and selling oil. But looking like a monster isn’t a good thing in these marginally more environmentally conscious days (if only from the point of view of the public), so it is vital to look and sound like the Jolly Green Giant - and the less you look like a giant at all, the more likely you are to convince us all that oil isn’t such a bad thing, and neither is economic growth, mass consumption, ceaseless driving and hyperexploitation of disappearing habitats.

We’re all in this together, aren’t we? Chevron want you to Join Them: “Will You Join Us” they plaintively ask, “we care too.”

One of the most critical environmental challenges facing the world today is reducing long-term growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The use of fossil fuels to meet the world’s energy needs has contributed the evalution of halloween in americato an increase in GHGs—mainly carbon dioxide and methane—in the earth’s atmosphere. Many think this increase is leading to climate change, with potentially adverse effects on people, economies, and the environment—from coastal flooding, to droughts, to changes in ecosystems and biodiversity. Many governments and businesses agree on the importance of addressing the risk of climate change. The challenge is to do so while still providing the energy required to meet the demands of growing populations and economies.

Time to deconstruct this statement, and see what they really think:

“One of the most critical” It is easily the most critical environmental “challenge”, and unlike almost any other change, is irreversible in the medium term due to the presence of a host of positive feedback loops. They are purposely downplaying the climate crisis because it would not pay to scare the consuming public.



“long-term growth” What about short- and medium-term growth? This is not something Chevron would want to address, because that will mean taking immediate action - they only want to appear to want to change, which is easy to do when you have long-term targets to satisfy.



“to meet the world’s energy needs” This essentially means that the need has to be met; our fundamental consumer industrial behaviour cannot change because this is commercially damaging, therefore, by inserting a baseline proposition (”the world’s energy needs”) we are presented with no possibility of fundamental change.

“Many think this increase is leading to climate change” Notice the lack of any concensus being presented: it must be made clear that there is uncertainty, rather than almost total agreement within the scientific body of evidence, for with uncertainly remains the ability to keep moving the goalposts. This is a very dangerous contscary halloween costumes on all saints eveention that Chevron are making; but it is no different to that of any other major corporation.



“Many governments and businesses agree” This is clever: by juxtaposing the far more sceptical governments and businesses with the scientific body of evidence, using the same phrasing, Chevron have managed to imply that governments and businesses are doing (or will do) exactly what is required to deal with climate change. The statement “Many governments and businesses agree” is actually true: it is the context that is so misleading.



“while still providing the energy required to meet the demands of growing populations and economies.” This is essentially a repeat of the opener, but in more strident terms, and with a twist: by bringing population into it, you actually reveal the “inevitability” view that corporations have to maintain. The “inevitable” growth of population and the economy is what corporations need to maintain their business, and by presenting this as a fait accompli, we are led to think there is nothing we can do about them; which is a blatant lie.

I was led to this horrible, cynical campaign by an emailer, whose comments, I think sum the campaign up rather well:

In train stations, at bus stops, online, even on our coffee cups, Chevron ads are trying to convince us that the key to ending our energy crisis is individual action. Over pictures of everyday Americans, taglines from Chevron’s “Will You Join Us” ad campaign read:



“I will leave the car at home more.”

“I will take my golf clubs out of the trunk.”

“I will replace 3 light bulbs with CFLs.”

“I will finally get a programmable thermostat.”

“I will consider buying a hybrid.”



All good ideas, certainly, but no matter how many clubs they’re carrying in their golf bags, no matter how many light bulbs they change, no matter how hard they consider that hybrid, the folks at Chevron could probably do a little more.

Like go out of business, perhaps?

BackTrack is a Security-Focused Live CD Packed With System Tools

BackTrack was the winner of our recent Hive Five for best Live CD, so we decided to take it for a test drive and show off a few of the features for everybody else.

BackTrack can be installed to a regular boot cd, a USB drive, installed to the hard drive, or even downloaded as a VMware virtual machine. For our testing, we used the BackTrack 3 stable release instead of the Beta 4 version since most commenters directly mentioned version 3 in the original call for contenders.

After inserting the LiveCD and starting ththe evalution of halloween in americae boot process, you'll be prompted to choose which window environment to load up—the distribution includes the more graphically pleasing KDE, or the trimmed-down Fluxbox window manager.

Once you've booted to the desktop you'll notice the default resolution is 800x600, but can be easily changed through the system tray icon to any resolution.

The slick system monitoring application on the right-hand side of the first screenshot doesn't get started automatically—to open it, you'll need to use the Alt+F2 shortcut key and type leetmode into the command window. You can unlock the position of the monitors through the context menu, and drag them wherever on the screen you'd like.

One of the more interesting features in the Live CD is the inclusion of the excellent and previously mentioned Yakuake drop-down terminal window, which can be launched through the Alt+F2 dialog, or found under the System menu. Once started, simply use the F12 annual north halsted halloween parade in chicagokey to toggle the slide-down terminal.
Connecting to any network resource can be done easily with the Network Folder Wizard, found in the menus at Internet -> KNetAttach. You can easily map to a Windows share, SSH, or FTP server using the wizard—which is nothing more than an easy front-end to the Konqueror browser's rich connection support.

Since this distribution is focused on security, you can find a ton of security-focused tools under the Backtrack menu, although there are far too many to mention every one of them here—you'll have to explore them on your own.

One of the more useful security tools for everyday use is the chntpw utility (foundtravel around mexico on halloween and join the parade in the menus under Privilege Escalation -> PasswordAttacks) that can reset any Windows password easily from the command line. For more on this command, I've previously written an article about changing your forgotten Windows password.

BackTrack 3 is a free download, works almost anywhere Linux does. Be sure to check out the original Hive Five for the rest of the Live CD choices from your fellow Lifehacker readers, or learn how to rescue files with Knoppix.

BackTrack