Top 5 tree hugging presidents, guess who's not on the list?

While Iraq is by far the biggest issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, the candidate’s environmental stances are more important this year than in any election preceding it.

We sincerely hope that our next president, whoever he or she may be, is committed to helping improve the planet’s environment. While they might not have had any great examples to follow the past few years, there are several U.S. presidents that did a lot for the environment. Here’s a list of 5 eco-friendly presidents in chronological order.

The 5 Most Environmentally Friendly Presidents in U.S. History

The future only happens once

I have to say if anything, just listening to Edwards speak is refreshing. Then you realize what he's saying and it's like a day at the water park in the middle of july refreshing. Check out where John Edwards stands on a litany of issues at Ontheissues.org.

We are our own asteroids

Ok maybe the image of the Death Star blowing up is kind of extreme, but I saw all the Star Wars movies on sale for sooo cheap at Walmart today. I have to go back and get them.

More than a decade ago, many scientists claimed that humans were demonstrating a capacity to force a major global catastrophe that would lead to a traumatic shift in climate, an intolerable level of destruction of natural habitats, and an extinction event that could eliminate 30 to 50 percent of all living species by the middle of the 21st century. Now those predictions are coming true. The evidence shows that species loss today is accelerating. We find ourselves uncomfortably privileged to be witnessing a mass extinction event as it's taking place, in real time.

The fossil record reveals some extraordinarily destructive events in the past, when species losses were huge, synchronous and global in scale. Paleontologists recognize at least five of these mass extinction events, the last of which occurred about 65 million years ago and wiped out all those big, charismatic dinosaurs (except their bird descendants) and at least 70 percent of all other species. (...)

In 2007, of 41,415 species assessed for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, 16,306 (39 percent) were categorized as threatened with extinction: one in three amphibians, one quarter of the world's pines and other coniferous trees, one in eight birds and one in four mammals. Another study identified 595 "centers of imminent extinction" in tropical forests, on islands and in mountainous areas. Disturbingly, only one-third of the sites surveyed were legally protected, and most were surrounded by areas densely populated by humans. We may not be able to determine the cause of past extinction events, but this time we have, indisputably: We are our own asteroids.

washingtonpost.com | read article

Google the omnipresent juggernaut

What won't, no wait can't Google do? They have gone no where but up since they began. Started in '96 by two Ph.D. students from Stanford with a new vision for search engines. They incorporated in '98 and opened trading on the stock market in Aug of '04 making millionaires our of many of its own employees. Following their motto of "Don't be evil", Google.org was created in '04 to raise awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. Most recently they played a huge role the formation and continuing work on the Open Handset Alliance. Now... wait for it, they are putting googols (haha get it) of money into developing sources of renewable energy that will be cheaper than coal. I think in the bible when they talked about the second coming of Jesus they we're really just referring to the formation of Google and its ongoing search to make the world a better place.

Ars Technica: "Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy"

An interesting fact(paradox). The term "Google" is searched for more than the terms God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism COMBINED.

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jesus