Well, there is some buzz in today's media that the President will announce some new support for global warming - carbon trading. From what I understand (and there are a few conflicting news items out there), non-polluting industries will get to sell their good behavior to industries that want to keep behaving badly. It's kind of like buying consumer carbon offsets, which is not nearly as good as actually reducing personal carbon footprints. At least in consumer carbon offset purchases (like Terrapass), the money spent for the carbon offset goes directly into green energy (in most cases). They are part of my portfolio of tricks to get my net consumption down. But the way Mr. Bush's program was explained via radio today, it would be like letting someone who litters keep littering as long as they paid off someone who wasn't going to litter anyway.

I hope I just don't get it.

And the Christmas lights? They're like a song in the dark wet cold of the Northwest winter. But I have this sneaky feeling it's going to become very uncool to string thousands of extra lights up for a month every year. I might have to go into mourning.