It should be obvious that the topic of the debt ceiling and budget battle is still weighing heavily on our minds, and is being heavily covered in most other major media sources. In case you missed the President's latest address on the issue last night, you can find it at whitehouse.gov - and we do recommend watching or reading it.
Today, though, we wanted to draw some focus back to a different story we've been monitoring for a while now.
In case you missed our links yesterday, the discussion about the Keystone XL pipeline is heating back up again in the Midwest, with two public hearings scheduled in Nebraska on the pipeline matter over the next month. As we've mentioned previously, we do not trust the oil pipeline companies to make good on their claims about safety for a host of reasons, including the recent Exxon Mobil spill into the Yellowstone River in Montana.
To be honest, we recommend you see Yellowstone Park and the Yellowstone River sometime in the near future, if you'd like to see a landscape that resembles the Ansel Adams photos you've likely admired. Sadly, the forecast for the future of Yellowstone, like many other places around the world, isn't a very comfortable one.
The heat waves sweeping North America, as well as the snow and cold sweeping South America and Australia have something in common with the attempt to put a dangerous oil pipeline that stretches from the Canadian Rockies all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
They're all related to global climate change.
The latest research continues to reinforce that what climate change scientists have said for years would happen if we didn't get our bad habits under control. The latest development is that frozen toxins, trapped in Arctic ice, are now being released at rates that have never been seen. Many of these are toxins that are no longer produced, but were generated years ago, like a poisonous ghost, now come back to haunt us all.
There are still those stubborn, obtuse people who say these are just ghost stories. So we'll ask a simple question: What's a loaf of bread cost now? What did it cost ten years ago? Twenty years ago? How about forty years ago?
What did it cost ten months ago?
Food costs around the world have gone up, every month, for ten out of the last twelve months, according to the latest research data. We know we've certainly seen it around the country - and we now know it's also happening worldwide.
How about global safety and stability? Famine in Ethiopia and Somalia isn't just something that happened back in the 80s and 90s. It's going on right now, and causing even more unrest in areas of the world where we're already concerned about famine and war breeding terrorism
Don't just think we'll use new technology to get ourselves out of this problem. The Saudi Arabia of lithium - a mineral that is key to new battery technology - is located in the Chilean desert of Atacama, the driest desert on Earth, perfect for drying the soil that holds the precious mineral.
The Atacama desert that just received snow this past week.
The problem of climate change, like many of the problems our society is facing, wasn't caused yesterday, and won't be solved easily or quickly anytime soon. But for our sake - and yours - we hope that governments and private businesses will continue to ramp up an even more rapid investment into green energy and green jobs.
Not only will such an investment produce more jobs NOW, which we need. Those jobs will likely pay better than many of the jobs corporate interests have left behind in America. It will also likely help make things better for all of us years down the road.
The human race simply can't stick our heads in the sandy, dry lakebeds of ignorance anymore.
