Earth: The Sequel – inspiring, well done

On Wednesday night, The Discovery Channel aired its one-hour documentary based on Fred Krupp's best-selling book Earth: The Sequel.

If you didn't catch it, they're repeating it again this Sunday. It goes through many of the latest innovations for producing alternative energy, and is quite inspiring. It really gives us -- excuse the overused term (in these days of Obama) -- "hope."

If these already proven technologies could be launched on a massive scale right away, we would not only stand a chance at avoiding the worst of global climate change (and yes, it is still real, despite right-wing nut jobs insisting it's already "over"), AND we could put people to work in good-paying, meaningful, long-lasting jobs and careers.

In fact, I think the entire stimulus should have gone to this effort. Screw the banks, let 'em fail. (Alright, some help should go directly to homeowners facing foreclosure and the unemployed to help them survive through the worst of this.) Let the failed, corrupt financial institutions go bankrupt, let the government restructure them, bring in new people, and start over. That way, CEOs will know there are consequences in the future, and will act accordingly.

Meanwhile, if Obama had launched what Al Gore suggested months ago, we could be on the way to a complete environmental and economic transformation.

It is continually being suggested that we'll need another stimulus package. This should be it.

You asked for it, Sarah Palin, you got it

"Show me where I have ever said that there's absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change," Palin told ABC News in an interview broadcast Thursday and Friday. "I have not said that."

Show you? Since you can't remember anything you've said, and are always contradicting yourself (like on the 'bridge to nowhere' thing), I'm here to help:

"When a species' habitat (in this case, sea ice) is declining due to climate change, but there are no discrete human activities that can be regulated or modified to effect change, what do you do?" -- you wrote this (my emphasis) in a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in December 2006 about listing the polar bear as a threatened species.

"A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location... I'm not one, though, who would attribute it to being man-made." -- Yup, that's you, Guv, on the Internet news site Newsmax just last month!

"I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity." -- Yep, you again, Ms. Palin, in an interview with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner this year.

There are many more lies you have already been caught on in the short time the press has begun to check you out, and I'm sure there will be many more. But since this was the only one you asked about, I'll stop there for now, out of deference. After all, you're an expert on the Russians, since your state is so close to a remote region of their country, so I'm sure you must be an expert on all foreign policy, and everything else!